

Vl'-i.-,-:! 




>=^.-^ A 




v'?- '-> 



^^ ^^ 






./ 



^.,^'< 









OO 



\' f 






'o^ 















-;^ 






OO^ 



^o^ 





:f 


"-% 


> 






v^'"^' 






I , N < . 


•^ 






' ""^y. 


C^^" 



c 






^^- V^ 






o 0^ 






.^■v 






.^•• 









.-;\- 




.-.-^ 



,v '^- 












^ 






















"'' '^ v^ 









.\0o. 






-^^^ 









■\'-' 






4\ V (P„ 



-.^-:> 



>.0°^ 



nO 















vOo^ 



-.0 



C' '' 



^ 



0. 






.■0- 'a, •* , 












.v'" 



'-K 






.^^' 



,.^^ %. 



,aN 



'J-' 



> 'if. rf. 

V ft ,, '^■^- * » I ^ ' 



^ A'- s * 



--• 






■V- 






,A 






^r5^d^ 






.^^ 






•^^. c< 



v-^-' .- 



•\ 















.X^ 






f.^ ,. V ,. -<. ^^ ft ft s -< ^\'\ O. ^ , ^ ■* 



■C" V. 

^V .\V- 









,^ ,^>* 




THE OLD COAST ROAD 

From Boston to Plymouth 



THE OLD COAST ROAD 

From Boston to Plymouth 



BY 

AGNES EDWARDS 

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY 
LOUIS H. RUYL 






BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

The Riverside Press Cambridge 
1920 



■T'rTfSf 



COPYRIGHT, IO20, nY AGNES EDWARDS PRATT 



ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



;?.6^^ 



©n!.A570325 

M -e m\} 



CONTENTS 

Boston: A Foreword ix 

I. Dorchester Heights and the Old Coast 

Road 1 

II. Milton and the Blue Hills 19 

III. Shipbuilding at Quincy 35 

IV. The Romance of Weymouth 57 
V. Ecclesiastical Hingham 75 

VI. Cohasset Ledges and Marshes 92 

VII. The Scituate Shore 111 

VIII. Marshfield, the Home of Daniel Web- 
ster 123 

IX. DuxBURY Homes 142 

X. Kingston and its Manuscripts 157 

XI. Plyiviouth 175 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

A Bit of Commercial Street in Weymouth 

Frontispiece 

The State House from Park Street ix '• 

Map of the South Shore Jacing \ 

Dorchester Bay 1 

Off for Plymouth by the Old Coast Road 18 / 

Great Blue Hill 19 

Milton Estates Jacing oq 

The Fore River Shipyard 35 

The Adams Houses in Quincy 5Q 

The Weyimouth Water-Front 57 

Rattling along the Old Coast Road 74 

The Lincoln House in Hingham 75 

The Old Ship Meeting-House /aaw^ 7G 

Interior of the New North Church in Hing- 
ham, with its Slave Galleries 91 

CoHAssET Ledges and Minot's Ledge Light 92 

Modern Coh asset 110 

Drying Sea-Moss at Scituate Harbor 111 



y 



viii ILLUSTRATIONS 

Fourth Cliff, Scituate 122 

The Webster House 123 

Marshfield Meadows Jodna 136 

A DuxBURY Cottage 142 

A Bay View to Duxbury Beach 156 

The Standish Monument as seen from Kings- 
ton 157 

Old Records 174 

The Memorial Building for the Town of 
Plymouth, designed by Little and Russell, 
Architects 175 

View from Steps of Burial Hill, Plymouth, 
showing the Town Square, Leyden Street, 
the Church of the Pilgrimage, the First 
Church, and, in the Distance, the Pilgrim 
Monument in Provincetown facing 192 

Clark's Island, Plymouth 203 




BOSTON: A FOREWORD 



TO love Boston or to laugh at Boston — 
it all depends on whether or not you are 
a Bostonian. Perhaps the happiest attitude — 
and the most intelligent — is tinged with both 
amusement and affection: amusement at the 
undeviating ceremonial of baked beans on 
Saturday night and fish balls on Sunday 
morning; at the Boston bag (not so ubiquitous 
now as formerly); at the indefatigable con- 



X BOSTON: A FOREWORD 

sumption of lectures ; at the Bostonese pronun- 
ciation; affection for the honorable traditions, 
noble buildings, distinguished men and women. 
Boston is an old city — one must remember 
that it was settled almost three centuries ago 
— and old cities, like old people, become tena- 
cious of their idiosyncrasies, admitting their 
inconsistencies and prejudices with compla- 
cency, wisely aware that age has bestowed on 
them a special value, which is automatically 
increased with the passage of time. 

To tell the story of an old city is like cutting 
down through the various layers of a fruity 
layer cake. When you turn the slice over, you 
see that every piece is a cross-section. So al- 
most every locality and phase of this venerable 
metropolis could be studied, and really should 
be studied, according to its historical strata: 
Colonial, Provincial, Revolutionary, economic, 
and literary. All of these periods have piled up 
their associations one upon the other, and all 
of them must be somewhat understood if one 
would sincerely comprehend what has aptly 
been called not a city, but a "state of mind." 



BOSTON: A FOREWORD xl 

It is as impossible for the casual sojourner 
to grasp the significance of the multifarious 
historical and literary events which have 
transpired here as for a few pages to outline 
them. Wherever one stands in Boston suggests 
the church of San Clemente in Rome, where, 
you remember, there are three churches built 
one upon the other. However, those who would 
take the lovely journey from Boston to Ply- 
mouth needs must make some survey, no 
matter how superficial, of their starting-place. 
And perhaps the best spot from which to begin 
is the Common. 

This pleasantly rolling expanse, which was 
set aside as long ago as 1640, with the decree 
that "there shall be no land granted either for 
houseplott or garden out of y*^ open land or 
common field," has been unbrokenly main- 
tained ever since, and as far as acreage goes 
(it approximates fifty acres) could still fulfill 
its original use of pasturing cows, a practice 
which was continued until 1830. It was here 
that John Hancock's cattle grazed — he who 
lived in such magnificence on the hill, and in 



xii BOSTON: A FOREWORD 

whose side yard the State House was built — 
and once, when preparations for an official 
banquet were halted by shortage of milk, tra- 
dition has it that he ordered his servants to 
hasten out on the Common and milk every 
cow there, regardless of ownership. Tradition 
also tells us that the little boy Ralph Waldo 
Emerson tended his mother's cow here; and 
finally both traditions and existing law de- 
clare that yonder one-story building opening 
upon Mount Vernon Street, and possessing 
an oddly wide door, must forever keep that 
door of sufficient width to let the cows pass 
through to the Common. 

Let us stand upon the steps of the State 
House and look out over the Common. To our 
right, near the intersection of Boylston and 
Tremont Streets, lies the half -forgotten, al- 
most obliterated Central Burying Ground, the 
final resting-place of Gilbert Stuart, the famous 
American painter. At the left points the spire 
of Park Street Church, notable not for its age, 
for it is only a little over a century old, but for 
its charming beauty, and by the fact that 



BOSTON: A FOREWORD xiii 

William Lloyd Garrison delivered his first 
address here, and here "America" was sung 
in public for the first time. It was the windi- 
ness of this corner which was responsible for 
Tom Appleton's suggestion (he was the 
brother-in-law of Longfellow) that a shorn 
lamb be tethered here. 

The graceful spire of Park Street Church 
serves not only as a landmark, but is also a 
most fitting terminal to a street of many asso- 
ciations. It is on Park Street that the pub- 
lishing house of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. (now 
Houghton Mifflin Company) has had its of- 
fices for forty years, and the bookstores and 
the antique shops tucked quaintly down a few 
steps below the level of the sidewalk have 
much of the flavor of a bit of London. 

Still standing on the State House steps, 
facing the Common, you are also facing what 
has been called the noblest monument in 
Boston and the most successfully placed one 
in America. It is Saint-Gaudens's bronze relief 
of Colonel Robert G. Shaw commanding his 
colored regiment, and if you see no other sculp- 



xiv BOSTON: A FOREWORD 

ture in a city which has its full quota you must 
see this memorial, spirited in execution, spirit- 
ual in its conception of a mighty moment. 

If we had time to linger we could not do 
better than to follow Beacon Street to the left, 
pausing at the Athenaeum, a library of such 
dignity and beauty that one instinctively, and 
properly, thinks of it as an institution rather 
than a mere building. To enjoy the Athenaeum 
one must be a "proprietor" and own a "share/* 
which entitles one not only to the use of the 
scholarly volumes in scholarly seclusion, but 
also in the afternoon to entrance to an alcove 
where tea is served for three pennies. Perhaps 
here, as well as any other place, you may see a 
characteristic assortment of what are fondly 
called "Boston types." There is the professor 
from Cambridge, a gentleman with a pointed 
beard and a noticeably cultivated enunciation; 
one from Wellesley — this, a lady — with that 
keen and paradoxically impractical expression 
which marks pure intellectuality; an alert 
matron, plainly, almost shabbily, dressed 
(aristocratic Boston still scorns sartorial smart- 



BOSTON: A FOREWORD xv 

ness); a very well-bred young girl with bone 
spectacles; a student, shabby, like the Back 
Bay matron, but for another reason; a writer; 
a business man whose hobby is Washingtonia. 
These, all of them, you may enjoy along with 
your cup of tea for three cents, if — and here 
is the crux — you can only be admitted in the 
first place. And if you are admitted, do not 
fail to look out of the rear windows upon the 
ancient Granary Burying Ground, where rest 
the ashes of Hancock, Sewall, Faneuil, Samuel 
Adams, Otis, Revere, and many more notables. 
If you have a penchant for graveyards, this 
one, entered from Tremont Street, is more than 
worthy of further study. 

This is one of the many things we could en- 
joy ably do if we had time, but whether we 
have time or not we must pay our respects to 
the State House (one does not call it the Cap- 
itol in Boston, as in other cities), the promi- 
nence of whose golden dome is not unsugges- 
tive, to those who recall it, of Saint Botolph's 
beacon tower in Boston, England, for which 
this city was named. The State House is a dis- 



xvi BOSTON: A FOREWORD 

tinctively American building, and Bulfinch, 
the great American architect, did an excellent 
thing when he designed it. The dome was orig- 
inally covered with plates of copper rolled by 
no other than that expert silversmith and 
robust patriot, Paul Revere — he whose mid- 
night ride has been recited by so many genera- 
tions of school-children, and whose exquisite 
flagons, cups, ladles, and sugar tongs not 
only compared with the best Continental 
work of that period, but have set a name 
and standard for American craftsmanship ever 
since. 

If you should walk up and down the chess- 
board of Beacon Hill — taking the knight's 
move occasionally across the narrow cross- 
streets — you could not help treading the very 
squares which were familiar to the feet of that 
generation of authors which has permanently 
stamped American literature. At 55 Beacon 
Street, down near the foot of the hill and fac- 
ing the Common, still stands the handsome, 
swell-front, buff-brick house where Prescott, 
the historian, lived. On Mount Vernon Street 



BOSTON: A FOREWORD xvii 

(which runs parallel to Beacon, and which, 
with its dignified beauty, won the approval of 
that connoisseur of beautiful streets — Henry 
James) one can pick out successively the num- 
bers 59, 76, 83, 84, the first and last being 
homes of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and the 
other two distinguished by the residence of 
William Ellery Channing and Margaret De- 
land. Pinckney Street runs parallel with Mount 
Vernon, and the small, narrow house at num- 
ber 20 was one of the homes of the Alcott fam- 
ily. It seems delightfully fitting that Louisburg 
Square — that very exclusive and very Eng- 
lish spot which probably retains more of the 
quaint atmosphere and customs of an aristo- 
cratic past than any other single area in the 
city — should have been the home of the well- 
beloved William Dean Howells. One also likes 
to recall that Jenny Lind was married at num- 
ber 20. Chestnut Street — which after a period 
of social obscurity is again coming into its own 
— possesses Julia Ward Howe's house at num- 
ber 13, that of Motley the historian at 16, and 
of Parkman at 50. In this hasty map we have 



xviii BOSTON: A FOREWORD 

gone up and down the hill, but the cross-street, 
Charles, although not so attractive, is never- 
theless as rich in literary associations as any 
in Boston. Here lived, for a short time, at 164, 
Oliver Wendell Holmes, and at 131 — also for 
a short time — Thomas Bailey Aldrich. It is, 
however, at 148, that we should longest pause. 
This, for many rich years, was the home of 
James T. Fields, that delightful man of letters 
who was the friend of many men of letters; he 
who entertained Dickens and Thackeray, and 
practically every foreign writer of note who 
visited this country; he who encouraged Haw- 
thorne to the completion of the "Scarlet Let- 
ter," and he, who, as an appreciative critic, 
publisher, and editor, probably did more to 
elevate, inspire, and sustain the general liter- 
ary tone of the city than any other single per- 
son. In these stirring days facile American 
genius springs up, like brush fires, from coast 
to coast. Novels pour in from the West, the 
Middle West, the South. To superficial out- 
siders it may seem as if Boston might be hard- 
pressed to keep her laurels green, but Boston 



BOSTON: A FOREWORD xix 

herself has no fears. Her present may not shine 
with so unique a brilHance as her past, but her 
past gains in luster with each succeeding year. 
Nothing can ever take from Boston her high 
literary prestige. 

While we are still on Beacon Hill we can 
look out, not only upon the past, but upon the 
future. Those white domes and pillars gleam- 
ing like Greek temples across the blue Charles, 
are the new buildings of the Massachusetts 
Institute of Technology, and surely Greek 
temples were never lovelier, nor dedicated to 
more earnest pursuit of things not mundane. 
Quite as beautiful and quite as Grecian as the 
Technology buildings is the noble marble 
group of the School of Medicine of Harvard 
University, out by the Fenlands — that sec- 
tion of the city which is rapidly becoming a 
students' quarter, with its Simmons College, 
the New England Conservatory of Music, art 
schools, gymnasiums, private and technical 
schools of all descriptions, and its body of over 
12,000 students. Harvard is, of course, across 
the river in Cambridge, and preparatory 



XX BOSTON: A FOREWORD 

schools and colleges dot the suburbs in every 
direction, upholding the cultural traditions of 
a city which has proved itself peculiarly fitted 
to educational interests. 

All this time we have, like bona-fide Bostoni- 
ans, stayed on Beacon Hill, and merely looked 
out at the rest of the city. And perhaps this is 
as typical a thing as we could have done. 
Beacon Hill was the center of original Boston, 
when the Back Bay was merely a marsh, and 
long after the marsh was filled in and streets 
were laid out and handsome residences lined 
them. Beacon Hill looked down scornfully at 
the new section and murmured that it was 
built upon the discarded hoopskirts and um- 
brellas of the true Bostonians. Even when al- 
most every one was crowded off the Hill and 
the Back Bay became the more aristocratic 
section of the two, there were still enough of 
the original inhabitants left to scorn these 
upstart social pretensions. And now Beacon 
Hill is again coming back into her own: the 
fine old houses are being carefully, almost wor- 
shipfully restored, probably never again to 



BOSTON: A FOREWORD xxi 

lose their rightful place in the general life of 
the city. 

But if Beacon Hill was conservative in re- 
gard to the Back Bay, that district, in its turn, 
showed an equal unprogressiveness in regard 
to the Esplanade. To the stranger in Boston, 
delighting in that magnificent walk along the 
Charles River Embankment, with the arching 
spans of the Cambridge and Harvard bridges 
on one side, and the homes of wealth and mel- 
low refinement on the other — a walk which 
for invigorating beauty compares with any in 
the cities of men — it seems incredible that 
when this promenade was laid out a few years 
ago, the householders along the water's edge 
absolutely refused to turn their front windows 
away from Beacon Street. Furthermore, they 
ignored the fact that their back yards and 
back windows presented an unbecoming face to 
such an incomparably lovely promenade, and 
the inevitable household rearrangement — by 
which the drawing-rooms were placed in the 
rear — was literally years in process of achieve- 
ment. But such conservatism is one of Boston's 



xxll BOSTON: A FOREWORD 

idiosyncrasies, which we must accept Hke the 
wind and the flat A. 

Present-day Bostonians are proud — and 
properly so — of their Copley Square, with its 
Public Library, rich with the mural paintings 
of Puvis de Chavannes, with Abbey's "Quest 
of the Holy Grail," and Sargent's "Frieze of 
the Prophets"; with its well-loved Trinity 
Church and with much excellent sculpture by 
Bela Pratt. Copley Square is the cultural cen- 
ter of modern Boston. The famous Lowell lec- 
tures — established about seventy -five years 
ago as free gifts to the people — are enthusi- 
astically attended by audiences as Bostonese 
as one could hope to congregate; and in all 
sorts of queer nests in this vicinity are Theo- 
sophical reading-rooms, small halls where 
Buddhism is studied or New Thought taught, 
and half a hundred very new or very old 
philosophies, religions, fads, fashions, reforms, 
and isms find shelter. It is easy to linger in 
Copley Square: indeed, hundreds and hun- 
dreds of men and women — principally women 
— come from all over the United States for the 



BOSTON: A FOREWORD xxiii 

sole purpose of spending a few months or a 
season In this very place, enjoying the lectures, 
concerts, and art exhibitions which are so 
easily and freely accessible. But in this bird's- 
eye flight across the historical and geograph- 
ical map of a city that tempts one to many 
pleasant delays, we must hover for a brief mo- 
ment over the South and the North Ends. 

Skipping back, then, almost three centuries, 
but not traveling far as distance goes, the 
stranger in Boston cannot do better than to 
find his way from Copley Square to the Old 
South Church on Washington Street — that 
venerable building whose desecration by the 
British troops in 1775 the citizens found it so 
hard ever to forgive. It w^as here^that Benja- 
min Franklin was baptized in 1706; here that 
Joseph Warren made a dramatic entry to the 
pulpit by way of the window in order to de- 
nounce the British soldiers; and here that mo- 
mentous meetings were held in the heaving 
days before the Revolution. The Old South 
Church Burying Ground is now called the 
King's Chapel Burying Ground, and King's 



xxiv BOSTON: A FOREWORD 

Chapel itself — a quaint, dusky building, sug- 
gestive of a London chapel — is only a few 
blocks away. Across its doorsill have not only 
stepped the Royal Governors of pre-Revolu- 
tionary days, but Washington, General Gage, 
the indestructibly romantic figures of Sir Harry 
Frankland and Agnes Surriage; the funeral 
processions of General Warren and Charles 
Sumner. The organ, which came from England 
in 1756, is said to have been selected by Handel 
at the request of King George, and along the 
walls of the original King's Chapel were hung 
the escutcheons of the Kings of England and 
of the Royal Governors. 

The Old State House is in this vicinity and 
is worthy — as are, indeed, both the Old South 
Church and King's Chapel — of careful archi- 
tectural study and enjoyment. There are por- 
traits, pictures, relics, and rooms within, and 
without the beautifully quaint lines and truly 
lovely details of the fagade infuse a perpetual 
charm into the atmosphere of the city. It was 
directly in front of this building that the Bos- 
ton Massacre took place in 1770, and from 



BOSTON: A FOREWORD xxv 

this second-story balcony that the repeal of 
the Stamp Act was read, and ten years later 
the full text of the Declaration of Independ- 
ence. 

Perhaps the next most interesting building 
in this section of old Boston is Faneuil Hall, 
the "Cradle of Liberty" whose dignified, old- 
fashioned proportions were not lost — thanks 
to Bulfinch — when it was enlarged. A gift of 
a public-spirited citizen, this building has 
served in a double capacity for a hundred and 
seventy-seven years, having public market- 
stalls below and a large hall above — a hall 
which is never rented, but used freely by the 
people whenever they wish to discuss public 
affairs. It would be impossible to enumerate 
the notable speakers and meetings which have 
rendered this hall famous, from General Gage 
down to Daniel Webster, Theodore Roosevelt, 
and Marshal Joffre. 

If you are fond of water sights and smells 
you can step from Faneuil Hall down to a 
region permeated with the flavor of salt and 
the sound of shipping, a region of both ancient 



xxvi BOSTON: A FOREWORD 

tradition and present activity. Here is India 
Wharf, its seven-story yellow-brick building 
once so tremendously significant of Boston's 
shipping prosperity; Long Wharf, so named 
because when it was built it was the longest in 
the country, and bore a battery at its end; 
Central Wharf, with its row of venerable stone 
warehouses; T Wharf, immensely picturesque 
with its congestion of craft of all descriptions ; 
Commercial Wharf, where full-rigged sailing 
vessels which traded with China and India and 
the Cape of Good Hope were wont to anchor 
a hundred years ago. All this region is crammed 
with the paraphernalia of a typical water- 
front: curious little shops where sailors' sup- 
plies are sold ; airy lofts where sails are cut and 
stitched and repaired ; fish stores of all descrip- 
tions; sailors' haunts, awaiting the pen of an 
American Thomas Burke. The old Custom 
House where Hawthorne unwillingly plodded 
through his enforced routine is here, and near 
it the new Custom House rears its tower four 
hundred and ninety-eight feet above the side- 
walk, a beacon from both land and sea. 



BOSTON: A FOREWORD xxvii 

The North End of Boston has not fared as 
well as the South End. The sons of Abraham 
and immigrants from Italy have appropriated 
the streets, dwellings, churches, and shops 
of the entire region, and even Christ Church 
(the famous Old North Church) has a Chiesa 
Italiana on its grounds. There are many 
touches to stir the memory in this Old North 
Church. The chime of eight bells naively stat- 
ing, "We are the first ring of bells cast for the 
British Empire in North America"; the pew 
with the inscription that is set apart for the 
use of the "Gentlemen of Bay of Honduras" 
— visiting merchants who contributed the 
spire to the church in 1740; vaults beneath the 
church, forbidden now to visitors, where lie 
the bones of many Revolutionary heroes; a 
unique collection of vellum-covered books, 
and a few highly precious pieces of ancient 
furniture. The most conspicuous item about 
the church, of course, is that from its tower 
were hung the signal lanterns of Paul Revere, 
destined to shine imperishably down the ever- 
lengthening aisles of American history. 



xxvlii BOSTON: A FOREWORD 

Before we press on to Bunker Hill — for 
that is our final destination — we should cast 
a glance at Copp's Hill Burying Ground, that 
hillside refuge where one can turn either back 
to the annals of the past or look out over the 
roof-tops and narrow streets to the present and 
the future. If you chose the latter, you can see 
easily Boston Harbor and Charlestown Navy 
Yard — that navy yard which has outstripped 
even its spectacular traditions by its stirring 
achievements in the Great War. "Old Iron- 
sides" will lie here forever in the well-earned 
serenity of a secure old age, and it is probable 
that another visitor, the Kronprinzessin Cecilie, 
although lost under the name of the Mount 
Vernon and a coat of gi'ay paint, will be long 
preserved in maritime memory. 

The plain shaft of Bunker Hill Monument, 
standing to mark the spot where the Americans 
lost a battle that was, in reality, a victory, is 
like a blank mirror, reflecting only that which 
one presents to it. According to your historical 
knowledge and your emotional grasp Bunker 
Hill Monument is significant. 



BOSTON: A FOREWORD xxix 

Skimming thus over the many-storied city, 
in a sort of Hterary airplane, it has been pos- 
sible to point out only a few of the most con- 
spicuous places and towers. The Common lies 
like a tiny pocket handkerchief of path- 
marked green at the foot of crowded Beacon 
Hill; the white Esplanade curves beside the 
blue Charles; the Back Bay is only a checker- 
board of streets, alphabetically arranged; 
Copley Square is hardly distinguishable. The 
spires of the Old South Church, King's Chapel, 
the Old State House, and Faneuil Hall punctu- 
ate the South End; the North Church, the 
North End. The new Custom House Tower 
and Bunker Hill Monument seem hardly more 
than the minarets of a child's toy village. 

The writer, as a pilot over this particular 
city, alights and resigns, commending for more 
detailed study, and for delightful guidance, 
Robert Shackleton's *'Book of Boston." Let 
us now leave the city and set out in a more 
leisurely fashion on our way to Plymouth. 



THE OLD COAST ROAD 

From Boston to Plymouth 




THE OLD COAST ROAD 



CHAPTER I 

DORCHESTER HEIGHTS AND THE OLD 
COAST ROAD 

THE very earliest of the great roads in 
New England was the Old Coast Road, 
connecting Boston with Plymouth — capitals 
of separate colonies. Do we, casually accept- 
ing the fruit of three hundred years of toil 
on this continent — do we, accustomed to 
smooth highways and swift and easy trans- 
portation, realize the significance of such a 
road? 

A road is the symbol of the civilization 
which has produced it. The main passageway 



2 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

from the shore of the Yellow Sea to the capital 
of Korea, although it has been pressed for 
centuries immemorial by myriads of human 
feet, has never been more than a bridle path. 
On the other hand, wherever the great Roman 
Empire stepped, it engineered mighty thor- 
oughfares which are a marvel to this day. A 
road is the thread on which the beads of his- 
tory are strung; the beads of peace as well as 
those of war. Thrilling as is the progress of 
aerial navigation, with its infinite possibilities 
of human intercourse, yet surely, when the 
entire history of man is unrolled, the moment 
of the conception of building a wide and per- 
manent road, instead of merely using a trail, 
will rank as equally dramatic. The first stone 
laid by the first Roman (they to whom the 
idea of road-building was original) will be 
recognized as significant as the quiver of the 
wings of the first airplane. 

Let us follow the old road from Boston to 
Plymouth: follow it, not with undue exacti- 
tude, and rather too hastily, as is the modern 
way, but comfortably, as is also the modern 



DORCHESTER HEIGHTS 3 

way, picking up what bits of quaint lore and 
half-forgotten history we most easily may. 

I think that as we start down this historic 
highway, we shall encounter — if our mood 
be the proper one in which to undertake such 
a journey — a curious procession coming down 
the years to meet us. We shall not call them 
ghosts, for they are not phantoms severed from 
earth, but, rather, the permanent possessors 
of the highway which they helped create. 

We shall meet the Indian first, running 
lightly on straight, moccasined feet, along the 
trail from which he has burned, from time to 
time, the underbrush. He does not go by land 
when he can go by water, but in this case there 
are both land and water to meet, for many are 
the streams, and they are unbridged as yet. 
With rhythmic lope, more beautiful than the 
stride of any civilized limbs, and with a sure 
divination of the best route, he chooses the 
trail which will ultimately be the highway of 
the vast army of pale-faces. Speed on, O soli- 
tary Indian — to vanish down the narrow 
trail of your treading as you are destined, in 



4 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

time, to vanish forever frora the vision of 
New England ! . . . Behind the red runner plod 
two stern-faced Pilgrims, pushing their way 
up from Plymouth toward the newer settle- 
ment at Massachusetts Bay. They come slowly 
and laboriously on foot, their guns cocked, 
eyes and ears alert, wading the streams with- 
out complaint or comment. They keep to- 
gether, for no one is allowed to travel over 
this Old Coast Road single, "nor without 
some arms, though two or three together." 
The path they take follows almost exactly the 
trail of the Indian, seeking the fords, avoiding 
the morasses, clinging to the uplands, and 
skirting the rough, wooded heights. . . . After 
them — almost a decade after — we see a 
man on horseback, with his wife on a pillion 
behind him. They carry their own provisions 
and those for the beast, now and then dis- 
mounting to lead the horse over difficult 
ground, and now and then blazing a tree to 
help them in their return journey — mute 
testimony to the cruder senses of the white 
man to whom woodcraft never becomes in- 



DORCHESTER HEIGHTS 5 

stinctive. The fact that this couple possesses 
a horse presages great changes in New Eng- 
land. Ferries will be established; tolls levied, 
bridges thrown across the streams which now 
the horses swim, or cross by having their 
front feet in one canoe ferry and their hind 
feet in another — the canoes being lashed to- 
gether. As yet we see no vehicle of any kind, 
except an occasional sedan chair. (The first 
one of these of which we have knowledge was 
presented to Governor Winthrop as a portion 
of a capture from a Spanish galleon.) How- 
ever, these are not common. In 1631 Governor 
Endicott of Salem wrote that he could not get 
to Boston to visit Governor Winthrop as he 
was not well enough to wade the streams. The 
next year we read of Governor Winthrop sur- 
mounting the difficulty when he goes to visit 
Governor Bradford, by being carried on the 
backs of Indians across the fords. (It took him 
two days to make the journey.) 

It is not strange that we see no wheeled 
vehicles. In 1672 there were only six stage- 
coaches in the whole of Great Britain, and 



6 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

they were the occasion of a pamphlet protest- 
ing that they encouraged too much travel! At 
this time Boston had one private coach. Al- 
though one swallow may not make a summer, 
one stage-coach marks the beginning of a new 
era. The age of walking and horseback riding 
approaches its end; gates and bars disappear, 
the crooked farm lanes are gradually straight- 
ened; and in come a motley procession of 
chaises, sulkies, and two-wheeled carts — two- 
wheeled carts, not four. There are sleds and 
sleighs for winter, but the four-wheeled wagon 
was little used in New England until the turn 
of the century. And then they were emphati- 
cally objected to because of the wear and tear 
on the roads! In 1669 Boston enacted that all 
carts "within y^ necke of Boston shall be and 
goe without shod wheels." This provision is 
entirely comprehensible, when we remember 
that there was no idea of systematic road re- 
pair. No tax was imposed for keeping the roads 
in order, and at certain seasons of the year 
every able-bodied man labored on the high- 
ways, bringing his own oxen, cart, and tools. 



DORCHESTER HEIGHTS 7 

But as the Old Coast Road, which was made 
a pubhc highway in 1639, becomes a genuine 
turnpike — so chartered in 1803 — the good 
old coaching days are ushered in with the 
sound of a horn, and handsome equipages with 
well-groomed, well-harnessed horses ply swiftly 
back and forth. Genial inns, with swinging 
pictorial signboards (for many a traveler can- 
not read), spring up along the way, and the 
post is installed. 

But even with fair roads and regular coach- 
ing service, New England, separated by her 
fixed topographical outlines, remains pro- 
vincial. It is not until the coming of the rail- 
road, in the middle of the nineteenth century, 
that the hills are overcome, and she ceases to 
be an exclusively coastwise community and 
becomes an integral factor in the economic 
development of the whole United States. 

Thus, then, from a thin thread of a trail 
barely wide enough for one moccasined foot 
to step before the other, to a broad, leveled 
thoroughfare, so wide that three or even four 
automobiles may ride abreast, and so clean 



8 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

that at the end of an all-day's journey one's 
face is hardly dusty, does the history of the 
Old Coast Road unroll itself. We who con- 
template making the trip ensconced in the up- 
holstered comfort of a machine rolling on air- 
filled tires, will, perhaps, be less petulant of 
some strip of roughened macadam, less be- 
wildered by the characteristic windings, if we 
recall something of the first back-breaking 
cart that — not so very long ago — crashed 
over the stony road, and toilsomely worked its 
way from devious lane to lane. 

Before we start down the Old Coast Road 
it may be enlightening to get a bird's-eye 
glimpse of it actually as we have historically, 
and for such a glimpse there is no better place 
than on the topmost balcony of the Soldier's 
Monument on Dorchester Heights. The trip 
to Dorchester Heights, in South Boston, is, 
through whatever environs one approaches it, 
far from attractive. This section of the city, 
endowed with extraordinary natural beauty 
and advantage of both land and water, and 
irrevocably and brilliantly graven upon the 



DORCHESTER HEIGHTS 9 

annals of American history, has been allowed 
to lose its ancient prestige and to sink low in- 
deed in the social scale. 

Nevertheless it is to Dorchester Heights 
that we, as travelers down the Old Coast 
Road, and as skimmers over the quickly turn- 
ing pages of our early New England history, 
must go, and having once arrived at that 
lovely green eminence, whitely pointed with a 
marble shaft of quite unusual excellence, we 
must grieve once more that this truly glorious 
spot, with its unparalleled view far down the 
many-islanded harbor to the east and far over 
the famous city to the west, is not more fre- 
quented, more enjoyed, more honored. 

If you find your way up the hill, into the 
monument, and up the stairs out to the bal- 
cony, probably you will encounter no other 
tourist. Only when you reach the top and 
emerge into the blue upper air you will meet 
those friendly winged visitors who frequent all 
spires — Saint Mark's in Venice or the Sol- 
dier's Monument in South Boston — the pi- 
geons! Yes, the pigeons have discovered the 



10 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

charm of this lofty loveHness, and whenever 
the caretaker turns away his vigilant eye, they 
haste to build their nests on balcony or stair. 
They alone of Boston's residents enjoy to the 
full that of which too many Bostonians ignore 
the existence. Will you read the inscriptions 
first and recall the events which have raised 
this special hill to an historic eminence equal 
to its topographical one? Or will you look out 
first, on all sides and see the harbor, the city 
and country as it is to-day? Both surveys 
will be brief; perhaps we will begin with the 
latter. 

Before us, to the wide east, lies Boston Har- 
bor, decked with islands so various, so fasci- 
nating in contour and legend, that more than 
one volume has been written about them and 
not yet an adequate one. From the point of 
view of history these islands are pulsating with 
life. From Castle Island (on the left) which was 
selected as far back as 1634 to be a bulwark of 
the port, and which, with its Fort Independ- 
ence, was where many of our Civil War sol- 
diers received their training, to the outline of 



DORCHESTER HEIGHTS 11 

Squantum (on the right), where in October, 
1917, there lay a marsh, and where, ten months 
later, the destroyer Delphy was launched from 
a shipyard that was a miracle of modern en- 
gineering — every mile of visible land is in- 
stinct with war-time associations. 

But history is more than battles and forts 
and the paraphernalia of war; history is eco- 
nomic development as well. And from this 
same balcony we can pick out Thompson's, 
Rainsford, and Deer Island, set aside for huge 
corrective institutions — a graphic example of 
a nation's progress in its treatment of the 
wayward and the weak. 

But if history is more than wars, it is also 
more than institutions. If it is the record of 
man's daily life, the pleasures he works for, 
then again we are standing in an unparalleled 
spot to look down upon its present-day mani- 
festations. From City Point with its Aquarium, 
from the Marine Park with its long pleasure 
pier, to Nantasket with its flawless beach, this 
is the summer playground of unnumbered 
hosts. Boaters, bathers, picnickers — all find 



12 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

their way here, where not only the cool breezes 
sweep their city-heated cheeks, but the for- 
ever bewitching passage of vessels in and out, 
furnishes endless entertainment. They know 
well, these laughing pleasure-seekers, crowding 
the piers and boats and wharves and beaches, 
where to come for refreshment, and now and 
then, in the history of the harbor, a solitary 
individual has taken advantage of the roman- 
tic charm which is the unique heritage of every 
island, and has built his home and lived, at 
least some portion of his days, upon one. 

Apple Island, that most perfectly shaped 
little fleck of land of ten acres, was the home 
of a Mr. March, an Englishman who settled 
there with his family, and lived there happily 
until his death, being buried at last upon its 
western slope. The fine old elms which adorned 
it are gone now, as have the fine old associa- 
tions. No one followed Mr. March's example, 
and Apple Island is now merely another ex- 
cursion point. 

On Calf Island, another ten-acre fragment, 
one of America's popular actresses, Julia Ar- 



DORCHESTER HEIGHTS 13 

thur, has her home. Thus, here and there, one 
stumbles upon individuals or small commu- 
nities who have chosen to live out in the har- 
bor. But one cannot help wondering how such 
beauty spots have escaped being more loved 
and lived upon by men and women who rec- 
ognize the romantic lure which only an island 
can possess. 

Of course the advantage of these positions 
has been utilized, if not for dwellings. Govern- 
ment buildings, warehouses, and the great sew- 
age plant all find convenient foothold here. 
The excursionists have ferreted out whatever 
beaches and groves there may be. One need 
not regret that the harbor is not appreciated, 
but only that it has not been developed along 
aesthetic as well as useful lines. 

We have been looking at the east, which is 
the harbor view. If we look to the west we see 
the city of Boston : the white tower of the Cus- 
tom House; the gold dome of the State House; 
the sheds of the great South Station ; the blue 
line of the Charles River. Here is the place to 
come if one would see a living map of the city 



14 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

and its environs. Standing here we realize how 
truly Boston is a maritime city, and standing 
here we also realize how it is that Dorchester 
Heights won its fame. 

It was in the winter of 1776, when the Brit- 
ish, under Lord Howe, were occupying Boston, 
and had fortified every place which seemed im- 
portant. By some curious oversight — which 
seems incredible to us as we actually stand 
upon the top of this conspicuous hill — they 
forgot this spot. 

When Washington saw what they had not 
seen — how this unique position commanded 
both the city and the harbor — he knew that 
his opportunity had come. He had no ade- 
quate cannon or siege guns, and the story 
of how Henry Knox — afterward General 
Knox — obtained these from Ticonderoga and 
brought them on, in the face of terrific diflS- 
culties of weather and terrain, is one that for 
bravery and brains will never fail to thrill. On 
the night of March 4, the Americans, keeping 
up a cannonading to throw the British off 
guard, and to cover up the sound of the mov- 



DORCHESTER HEIGHTS 15 

ing, managed to get two thousand Continental 
troops and four hundred carts of fascines and 
intrenching tools up on the hill. That same 
night, with the aid of the moonlight, they 
threw up two redoubts — performing a task, 
which, as Lord Howe exclaimed in dismay the 
following morning, was "more in one night 
than my whole armj'' could have done in a 
month." 

The occupation of the heights was a mag- 
nificent coup. The moment the British saw 
what had been done, they realized that they 
had lost the fight. However, Lord Percy hur- 
ried to make an attack, but the weather made 
it impossible, and by the time the weather 
cleared the Americans were so strongly' in- 
trenched that it was futile to attack. Washing- 
ton, although having been granted permission 
by Congress to attack Boston, wished to save 
the loyal city if possible. Therefore, he and 
Howe made an agreement by which Howe was 
to evacuate and Washington was to refrain 
from using his guns. After almost two weeks of 
preparation for departure, on March 17 the 



16 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

British fleet, as the gilded letters on the white 
marble panel tell us, in the words of Charles 
W.Eliot: 

Carrying 11,000 effective men 

And 1000 refugees 

Dropped down to Nantasket Roads 

And thenceforth 

Boston was free 

A strong British force 

Had been expelled 

From one of the United American colonies 

The white marble panel, with its gold letters 
and the other inscriptions on the hill, tell the 
whole story to whoever cares to read, only 
omitting to mention that the thousand self- 
condemned Boston refugees who sailed away 
with the British fleet were bound for Halifax, 
and that that was the beginning of the oppro- 
brious term: " Go to Halifax." 

That the battle was won without bloodshed 
in no way minimizes the verdict of history that 
"no single event had a greater general effect 
on the course of the war than the expulsion of 
the British from the New England capital." 
And surely this same verdict justifies the per- 



DORCHESTER HEIGHTS 17 

petual distinction of this unique and beautiful 
hill. 

This, then, is the story of Dorchester Heights 

— a story whose glory will wax rather than 
wane in the years, and centuries, to come. Let 
us be glad that out of the reek of the mod- 
ern city congestion this green hill has been 
preserved and this white marble monument 
erected. Perhaps you see it now with differ- 
ent, more sympathetic eyes than when you first 
looked out from the balcony platform. Before 
us lies the water with its multifarious islands, 
bays, promontories, and coves, some of which 
we shall now explore. Behind us lies the city 
which we shall now leave. The Old Coast Road 

— the oldest in New England — winds from 
Boston to Plymouth, along yonder southern 
horizon. More history than one person can 
pleasantly relate, or one can comfortably lis- 
ten to, lies packed along this ancient turnpike : 
incidents closer set than the tombs along the 
Appian Way. We will not try to hear them 
all. Neither will we follow the original road too 
closely, for we seek the beautiful pleasure drive 



18 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

of to-day more than the historic highway of 
long ago. 

Boston was made the capital of the Massa- 
chusetts Bay Colony in 1632. Plymouth was a 
capital a decade before. It is to Plymouth that 
we now set out. 




-^t^=«f 







i^"" iT%-'^''*^'?^^'5^*ir^^rjf -^^^^ 



CHAPTER II 

MILTON AND THE BLUE HILLS 

MILTON — a town of dignity and dis- 
tinction ! A town of enterprise and char- 
acter! Ever since the first water-power mill in 
this country; the first powder mill in this coun- 
try; the first chocolate mill in this country, and 
thus through a whole line of "first" things — 
the first violoncello, the first pianoforte, the 
first artificial spring leg, and the first railroad 
to see the light of day saw it in this grand old 
town — the name of Milton has been synony- 
mous with initiative and men and women of 
character. 

Few people to-day think of Milton in terms 
of industrial repute, but, rather, as a place of es- 
tates, too aristocratic to be fashionable, of his- 
toric houses, and of charming walks and drives 



20 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

and views. Many of the old families who have 
given the town its prestige still live in their 
ancestral manors, and many of the families 
who have moved there in recent years are of 
such sort as will heighten the fame of the fa- 
mous town. As the stranger passes through 
Milton he is captivated by glimpses of ancient 
homesteads, settling behind their white Colo- 
nial fences topped with white Colonial urns, 
half hidden by their antique trees with an air 
of comfortable ease; of new houses, elegant and 
yet informal; of cottages with low roofs; of 
well-bred children playing on the wide, green 
lawns under the supervision of white-uniformed 
nurses; of old hedges, old walls, old trees; new 
roads, old drives, new gardens, and old gar- 
dens — everything well placed, well tended, 
everything presenting that indescribable at- 
mosphere of well-established prosperity that 
scorns show; of breeding that neither parades 
nor conceals its quality. Yes — this is Milton; 
this is modern Milton. Boston society receives 
some of its most prominent contributions from 
this patrician source. But modern Milton is 



MILTON AND THE BLUE HILLS 21 

something more than this, as old Milton was 
something more than this. 

For Milton, from this day of its birth, and 
countless centuries before its birth as a town, 
has lived under the lofty domination of the 
Blue Hills, that range of diaphanous and yet 
intense blue, that swims forever against the 
sky, that marches forever around the horizon. 
The rounded summits of the Blue Hills, to 
which the eye is irresistibly attracted before 
entering the town which principally claims 
them, are the worn-down stumps of ancient 
mountains, and although so leveled by the proc- 
ess of the ages, they are still the highest land 
near the coast from Maine to Mexico. These 
eighteen or twenty skyey crests form the south- 
ern boundary of the so-called Boston Basin, 
and are the most prominent feature of the 
southern coast. From them the Massachuset 
tribe about the Bay derived its name, signify- 
ing "Near the Great Hills," which name was 
changed by the English to Massachusetts, and 
applied to both bay and colony. Although its 
Indian name has been taken from this lovely 



22 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

range, the loveliness remains. All the surround- 
ing country shimmers under the mysterious 
bloom of these heights, so vast that everything 
else is dwarfed beside them, and yet so curi- 
ously airy that they seem to perpetually ripple 
against the sky. The Great Blue Hill, especially 
— the one which bears an observatory on its 
summit — swims above one's head. It seems 
to have a singular way of moving from point 
to point as one motors, and although one may 
be forced to admit that this may be due more 
to the winding roads than to the illusiveness of 
the hill, still the buoyant effect is the same. 

Ruskin declares somewhere, with his quaint 
and characteristic mixture of positiveness and 
idealism, that "inhabitants of granite coun- 
tries have a force and healthiness of character 
about them that clearly distinguishes them 
from the inliabitants of less pure districts.'* 
Perhaps he was right, for surely here where the 
succeeding generations have all lived in the 
atmosphere of the marching Blue Hill, each has 
through its own fair name, done honor to the 
fair names which have preceded it. 



MILTON AND THE BLUE HILLS 23 

One of the very first to be attracted by the 
lofty and yet lovely appeal of this region was 
Governor Thomas Hutchinson, the last of the 
Royal Governors Massachusetts was to know. 
It was about the middle of the eighteenth 
century that this gentleman, of whom John 
Adams wrote, " He had been admired, revered, 
and almost adored," chose as the spot for 
his house the height above the Neponset 
River. If we follow the old country Heigh Waye 
to the top of Unquity (now Milton) Hill, 
we will find the place he chose, although the 
house he built has gone and another stands in 
its place. Fairly near the road, it overlooked 
a rolling green meadow (a meadow which, by 
the gift of John Murray Forbes, will always be 
kept open), with a flat green marsh at its feet 
and the wide flat twist of the Neponset River 
winding through it, for all the world like a deco- 
rative panel by Puvis de Chavannes. One can 
see a bit of the North Shore and Boston Har- 
bor from here. This is the view that the Gov- 
ernor so admired, and tradition tells us that 
when he was forced to return to England he 



24 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

walked on foot down the hill, shaking hands 
with his neighbors, patriot and Tory alike, with 
tears in his eyes as he left behind him the gar- 
den and the trees he had planted, and the house 
where he had so happily lived. Although the 
view from the front of the house is exquisite, the 
view from the back holds even more intimate 
attraction. Here is the old, old garden, and al- 
though the ephemeral blossoms of the present 
springtime shine brightly forth, the box, full 
twenty feet high, speaks of another epoch. Fox- 
gloves lean against the "pleached alley," and 
roses clamber on a wall that doubtless bore the 
weight of their first progenitors. 

Another governor who chose to live in Mil- 
ton was Jonathan Belcher, but one fancies it 
was the grandness rather than the sweetness 
of the scene which attracted this rather spec- 
tacular person. The Belcher house still exists, 
as does the portrait of its master, in his wig and 
velvet coat and waistcoat, trimmed with rich- 
est gold lace at the neck and wrists. Small- 
clothes and gold knee and shoe buckles com- 
plete the picture of one who, when his mansion 



MILTON AND THE BLUE HILLS 25 

was planned, insisted upon an avenue fifty feet 
wide, and so nicely graded that visitors on en- 
tering from the street might see the gleam of 
his gold knee buckles as he stood on the dis- 
tant porch. The avenue, however, was never 
completed, as Belcher was appointed governor 
of, and transferred to. New Jersey shortly after. 

Two other men of note, who, since the days 
of our years are but threescore and ten, chose 
that their days without number should be 
spent in the town they loved, were Wendell 
Phillips and Rimmer the sculptor, who are both 
buried at Milton. 

Not only notable personages, but notable 
events have been engendered under the shadow 
of these hills. The Suffolk Resolves, which were 
the prelude of the Declaration of Independence, 
were adopted at the Vose House, which still 
stands, square and unadorned, easy of access 
from the sidewalk, as is suitable for a home of 
democracy. The first piano ever made in this 
country received its conception and was brought 
to fulfillment in the Crehore house, which, al- 
though still sagging a bit, is by no means out 



^6 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

of commission. And Wilde's Tavern, where was 
formed the pubhc opinion in a day when the 
forming of pubhc opinion was of preeminent 
importance, still retains, in its broad, hospita- 
ble lines, some shred of its ancient charm. 

Milton is full of history. From the Revolu- 
tionary days, when the cannonading at Bunker 
Hill shook the foundations of the houses, but 
not the nerves of the Milton ladies, down to 
the year 1919, when the Fourth Liberty Loan 
of $2,955,250 was subscribed from a popula- 
tion of 9000, all the various vicissitudes of 
peace and war have been sustained on the 
high level that one might expect from men 
and women nobly nurtured by the strength of 
the hills. 

How much of its success Milton attributes 
to its location — for one joins, indeed, a dis- 
tinguished fellowship when one builds upon 
a hill, or on several hills, as Roman as well 
as Bostonian history testifies — can only be 
guessed by its tribute in the form of the Blue 
Hills Reservation. This State recreation park 
and forest reserve of about four thousand acres 



MILTON AND THE BLUE HILLS 27 

— a labyrinth of idyllic footpaths and leafy 
trails, of twisting drives and walks that open 
out upon superb vistas, is now the property 
of the people of Massachusetts. The gi-anite 
quarry man — far more interested in the value 
of the stone that underlay the wooded slopes 
than in Ruskin's theory of its purifying effect 
upon the inhabitants — had already obtained 
a footing here, when, under the able leadership 
of Charles Francis Adams, the whole region 
was taken over by the State in 1894. 

As you pass through the Reservation — and 
if you are taking even the most cursory glimpse 
of Milton you must include some portion of 
this park — you will pass the open space where 
in the early days, when Milton country life was 
modeled upon English country life more closely 
than now, Malcolm Forbes raced upon his pri- 
vate track the horses he himself had bred. The 
race-track with its judges' stands is still there, 
but there are no more horse-races, although 
the Forbes family still holds a conspicuous 
place in all the social as well as the philan- 
thropic enterprises of the countryside. You may 



28 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

see, too, a solitary figure with a scientist's 
stoop, or a tutor with a group of boys, making 
a first-hand study of a region which is full of 
interest to the geologist. 

Circling thus around the base of the Great 
Blue Hill and irresistibly drawn closer and 
closer to it as by a magnet, one is impelled to 
make the ascent to the top — an easy ascent 
with its destination clearly marked by the 
Rotch Meteorological Observatory erected in 
1884 by the late A. Lawrence Rotch of Milton, 
who bequeathed funds for its maintenance. It 
is now connected with Harvard University. 

Once at the top the eye is overwhelmed by a 
circuit of more than a hundred and fifty miles ! 
It is almost too immense at first — almost as 
barren as an empty expanse of rolling green 
sea. But as the eye grows accustomed to the 
stretching distances, objects both near and far 
begin to appear. And soon, if the day is clear, 
buildings may be identified in more than one 
hundred and twenty-five villages. We are six 
hundred and thirty-five feet above the sea, on 
the highest coastland from Agamenticus, near 



MILTON AND THE BLUE HILLS 29 

York, Maine, to the Rio Grande, and the pano- 
rama thus unrolled is truly magnificent. Facing 
northerly we can easily distinguish Cambridge, 
Somerville, and Maiden, and far beyond the 
hills of Andover and Georgetown. A little to 
the east, Boston with its gilded dome; then the 
harbor with its islands, headlands, and fortifi- 
cations. Beyond that are distinctly visible va- 
rious points on the North Shore, as far as 
Eastern Point Lighthouse in Gloucester. Forty 
miles to the northeast appear the twin light- 
houses on Thatcher's Island, seeming, from 
here, to be standing, not on the land, but out 
in the ocean. Nearer and more distinct is Bos- 
ton Light — a sentinel at the entrance to the 
harbor, while beyond it stretches Massachu- 
setts Bay. Turning nearly east the eye, passing 
over Chickatawbut Hill — three miles off and 
second in height of the Blue Hills — follows 
the beautiful curve of Nantasket Beach, and 
the pointing finger of Minot's Light. Facing 
nearly south, the long ridge of Manomet Hill 
in Plymouth, thirty-three miles away, stands 
clear against the sky, while twenty-six miles 



30 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

away, in Duxbury, one sees the Myles Stand- 
ish Monument. Directly south rises the smoke 
of the city of Fall River; to the westerly, Woon- 
socket, and continuing to the west, Mount Wa- 
chusett in Princeton. Far to the right of Wa- 
chusett, nearly over the dome of the Dedham 
Courthouse, rounds up Watatic in Ashburn- 
ham, and northwest a dozen peaks of southern 
New Hampshire. At the right of Watatic and 
far beyond it is the Grand Monadnock in Jaf- 
frey, 3170 feet above the sea and sixty-seven 
and a half miles away. On the right of Grand 
Monadnock is a group of nearer summits: 
Mount Kidder, exactly northwest; Spofford 
and Temple Mountains; then appears the re- 
markable Pack-Monadnock, near Peterboro, 
with its two equal summits. The next group to 
the right is in Lyndeboro. At the right of 
Lyndeboro, and nearly over the Readville rail- 
road stations, is Joe English Hill, and to com- 
plete the round, nearly north-northwest are 
the summits of the Uncanoonuc Mountains, 
fifty -nine miles away. 

This, then, is the Great Blue Hill of Milton. 



MILTON AND THE BLUE HILLS 31 

Those who are famihar with the State of Mas- 
sachusetts — and New England — can stand 
here and pick out a hundred distinguishing 
landmarks, and those who have never been 
here before may find an unparalleled oppor- 
tunity to see the whole region at one sweep of 
the eye. 

From the point of view of topography the 
summit of Great Blue Hill is the place to reach. 
But for the sense of mysterious beauty, for 
snatches of pictures one will never forget, the 
little vistas which open on the upward or the 
downward trail, framed by hanging boughs 
or encircled by a half frame of stone and hill- 
side — these are, perhaps, more lovelj^ The 
hill itself, seen from a distance, floating lightly 
like a vast blue ball against a vaster sky, is 
dreamily suggestive in a way which the actual 
view, superb as it is, is not. One remembers 
Stevenson's observation, that sometimes to 
travel hopefully is better than to arrive. So let 
us come down, for, after all, "Love is of the val- 
ley." Down again to the old town of Milton. 
We have not half begun to wander over it : not 



32 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

half begun to hear the pleasant stories it has 
to tell. When one is as old as this — for Milton 
was discovered by a band from Plymouth who 
came up the Neponset River in 1621 — one has 
many tales to tell. 

Of all the towns along the South Shore there 
are few whose feet are so firmly emplanted in 
the economic history of the past and present 
as is Milton. That peculiar odor of sweetness 
which drifts to us with a turn of the wind, 
comes from a chocolate mill whose trade-mark 
of a neat-handed maid with her little tray is 
known all over the civilized world. And those 
mills stand upon the site of the first grist mill in 
New England to be run by water power. This 
was in 1634, and one likes to picture the sturdy 
colonists trailing into town, their packs upon 
their backs, like children in kindergarten games, 
to have their grain ground. Israel Stoughton 
was the name of the man who established this 
first mill — a name perpetuated in the near-by 
town of Stoughton. 

All ground is historic ground in Milton. That 
rollicking group of schoolboys yonder belongs 



MILTON AND THE BLUE HILLS 33 

to an academy, which, handsome and flourish- 
ing as it is to-day, was founded as long ago as 
1787. That seems long ago, but there was a 
school in Milton before that: a school held in 
the first meeting-house. Nothing is left of this 
quaint structure but a small bronze bas-relief, 
set against a stone wall, near its original site. 
This early church and early school was a log 
cabin with a thatched roof and latticed win- 
dows, if one may believe the relief, but men of 
brains and character were taught there lessons 
which stood them and the colony in good stead. 
One fancies the students' roving eyes may have 
occasionally strayed down the Indian trail di- 
rectly opposite the old site — a trail which, 
although now attained to the proud rank of a 
lane, Churchill's Lane, still invites one down 
its tangled green way along the gray stone wall. 
Yes, every step of ground has its tradition here. 
Yonder railroad track marks the spot where the 
very first tie in the country was laid, and laid 
for no less significant purpose than to facilitate 
the carrying of granite blocks for Bunker Hill 
Monument from their quarry to the harbor. 



34 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

Granite from the hills — the hills which 
swim forever against the sky and march for- 
ever above the distant horizon. Again we are 
drawn back to the UTesistible magnet of those 
mighty monitors. Yes, wherever one goes in 
Milton, either on foot to-day or back through 
the chapters of three centuries ago, the Blue 
Hills dominate every event, and the Great 
Blue Hill floats above them all. 

"I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from 
whence cometh my help," chants the psalmist. 
Ah, well, no one can say it better than that — 
except the hills themselves, which, with gentle 
majesty, look down affectionately upon the 
town at their feet. 








r -^.f'c^:'^^?--^ - ':< - i,^-- ji -- - 









CHAPTER III 

SHIPBUILDING AT QUINCY 

THE first man-made craft which floated 
on the waters of what is now Fore River 
was probably a Uttle dugout, a crude boat 
made by an Indian, who burned out the center 
of a pine log which he had felled by girdling 
with fire. After he had burned out as much as 
he could, he scraped out the rest with a stone 
tool called a "celt." The whole operation prob- 
ably took one Indian three weeks. The Riva- 
davia which slid down the ways of the Fore 
River Shipbuilding Corporation in August, 
1914, weighed 13,400 tons and had engaged the 
labor of 2000 men for fifty months. 



36 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

Between these two extremes flutter all the 
great sisterhood of shallops, sloops, pinks, 
schooners, snows, the almost obsolete batteau 
and periagua, the gundelow with its picturesque 
lateen sail, and all the winged host that are 
now merely names in New England's maritime 
history. 

We may not give in this limited space an 
account of the various vessels which have 
sailed down the green-sea aisles the last three 
hundred years. But of the very first, "a great 
and strong shallop" built by the Plymouth set- 
tlers for fishing, we must make brief mention, 
and of the Blessing of the Bay, the first sea- 
worthy native craft to be built and launched 
on these shores — the pioneer of all New Eng- 
land commerce. Built by Governor Winthrop, 
he notes of her in his journal on August 31, 
1631, that "the bark being of thirty tons went 
to sea." That is all he says, but from that sig- 
nificant moment the building of ships went on 
"gallantly," as was indeed to be expected in a 
country whose chief industry was fishing and 
which was so admirably surrounded by natural 



SHIPBUILDING AT QUINCY 37 

bays and harbors. In 1665 we hear of the Great 
and General Court of Massachusetts — which 
distinctive term is still applied to the Massa- 
chusetts Legislature — forbidding the cutting 
of any trees suitable for masts. The broad ar- 
row of the King was marked on all white pines, 
twenty -four inches in diameter, three feet from 
the ground. Big ships and little ships swarmed 
into existence, and every South Shore town 
made shipbuilding history. The ketch, a two- 
masted vessel carrying from fifteen to twenty 
tons, carried on most of the coasting traffic, 
and occasionally ventured on a foreign voyage. 
When we recall that the best and cheapest 
ships of the latter half of the seventeenth cen- 
tury were built here in the new country, we 
realize that shipyards, ports, docks, proper 
laws and regulations, and the invigorating 
progress which marks any thriving industry 
flourished bravely up and down the whole New 
England coast. 

It is rather inspiring to stand here on the 
bridge which spans the Fore River, and pic- 
ture that first crude dugout being paddled 



38 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

along by the steady stroke of the red man, and 
then to look at the river to-day. Every traveler 
through Quincy is familiar with the aerial net- 
work of steel scaffolding criss-crossing the sky, 
with the roofs of shops and offices and glimpses 
of vessels visible along the water-front. But few 
travelers realize that these are merely the su- 
perficial features of a shipyard which under the 
urge of the Great War delivered to the Navy, 
in 1918, eighteen completed destroyers, which 
was as many as all the other yards in the 
country put together delivered during this 
time. A shipyard which cut the time of building 
destroyers from anywhere between eighteen 
and thirty-two months to an average of six 
months and a half; a shipyard which made the 
world's record of one hundred and seventy-four 
days from the laying of the keel to the deliver- 
ing of a destroyer. 

It is difficult to grasp the meaning of these 
figures. Difficult, even after one has obtained 
entrance into this city within a city, and seen 
with his own eyes tw^enty thousand men toiling 
like Trojans. Seen a riveting crew which can 



SHIPBUILDING AT QUINCY 39 

drive more than twenty-eight hundred rivets 
in nine hours; battleships that weigh thirty 
thousand tons; a plate yard piled with steel 
plates and steel bars worth two million dollars ; 
cranes that can lift from five tons up to others 
of one hundred tons capacity; single buildings 
a thousand feet long and eighty feet high. 

Perhaps the enormousness of the plant is 
best comprehended, not when we mechanically 
repeat that it covers eighty acres and com- 
prises eighty buildings, and that four full-sized 
steam locomotives run up and down its yard, 
but when we see how many of the intimate 
things of daily living have sprung up here as 
little trees spring up between huge stones. For 
the Fore River Plant is more than an indus- 
trial organization. It is a social center, an eco- 
nomic entity. It has its band and glee club, ball 
team and monthly magazine. There are re- 
freshment stands, and a bathing cove; a brand- 
new village of four hundred and thirtj^-eight 
brand-new houses ; dormitories which acconuno- 
date nearly a thousand men and possess every 
convenience and even luxuries. The men work 



40 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

hard here, but they are well paid for their work, 
as the many motor-cycles and automobiles 
waiting for them at night testify. It is a scene 
of incredible industry, but also of incredible 
completeness. 

To look down upon the village and the yard 
from the throbbing roof of the steel mill, seven 
hundred and seventy feet long and a hundred 
and eighty-eight wide, is a thrilling sight. 
Within the yard, confined on three sides by its 
high fences and buildings and on the fourth by 
Weymouth Fore River, one sees, far below, lo- 
comotives moving up and down on their tracks ; 
great cranes stalking long-leggedly back and 
forth; smoke from foundry, blacksmith shop, 
and boiler shop; men hurrying to and fro. 
Whistles blow, and whole buildings tremble. 
The smoke and the grayness might make 
it a gloomy scene if it were not for the red 
sides of the immense submarines gleaming 
in their wide slips to the water. Everywhere 
one sees the long gray sides of freighters, de- 
stroyers, merchant ships, and oil tankers heav- 
ing like the mailed ribs of sea animals basking 



SHIPBUILDING AT QUINCY 41 

on the shore. Practically every single opera- 
tion, from the most stupendous to the most 
delicate, necessary for the complete construc- 
tion of these vessels, is carried on in this yard. 
The eighty acres look small when we realize 
the extent and variety of the w^ork achieved 
within its limits. 

Yes, the solitary Indian, working with fire 
and celt on his dugout, would not recognize 
this once familiar haunt, nor would he know 
the purpose of these vast vessels without sail or 
paddle. And yet, were this same Indian stand- 
ing on the roof with us, he would see a wide 
stream of water he knew well, and he would see, 
too, above the smoke of the furnace, shop, and 
boiler room, the friendly green of the trees. 

Perhaps there is nothing which makes us 
realize the magical rapidity of growth so much 
as to look from this steel city and to see the 
woods close by. For instead of being surrounded 
by the sordid congestion of an industrial cen- 
ter, the Fore River Shipyard is in the midst of 
practically open country. 

While we are speaking of rapidity we must 



42 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

look over toward the Victory Plant at Squan- 
tum, that miraculous marsh which was drained 
with such expedition that just twelve months 
from the day ground was broken for its foun- 
dation, it launched its first ship, and less than 
two years after completed its entire contract. 
Surely never in the history of shipbuilding 
have brain and brawn worked so brilliantly 
together ! 

In this way, then, the history of the ships 
that have sailed the seven seas has been built 
up at Quincy — a dramatic history and one 
instinct with the beauty which is part of glid- 
ing canoe and white sails, and part, too, of the 
huge smooth-slipping monsters of a modern 
day, sleek and swift as leviathans. But all the 
while the building of these ships has been going 
on, there has been slowly rising within the self- 
same radius another ship, vaster, more inspir- 
ing, calling forth initiative even more intense, 
idealism even more profound — the Ship of 
State. 

We who journey to-day over the smooth or 
troubled waters of national or international 



SHIPBUILDING AT QUINCY 43 

affairs are no more conscious of the infinite 
toil and labors which have gone into the intri- 
cate making of the vessel that carries us, than 
are travelers conscious of the cogs and screws, 
the engines and all the elaboration of detail 
which compose an ocean liner. Like them we 
sometimes grumble at meals or prices, at some 
discourtesy or incompetence, but we take it for 
granted that the engine is in commission, that 
the bottom is whole and the chart correct. The 
great Ship of State of this country may occa- 
sionally run into rough weather, but Americans 
believe that, in the last analysis, she is honestly 
built. And it is to Quincy that we owe a large 
initial part of this building. 

It is astonishing to enumerate the nota- 
ble public men, who have been influential in 
establishing our national policy, who have 
come from Quincy. There is no town in this 
entire country which can equal the record. 
What other town ever produced two Presi- 
dents of the United States, an Ambassador to 
Great Britain, a Governor of the Common- 
wealth, a Mayor of Boston, two presidents of 



44 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

Harvard University, and judges, chief jus- 
tices, statesmen, and orators in such quantity 
and of such quality? Truly this group of emi- 
nent men of brilliance, integrity, and public 
feeling is unique in our history. To read the 
biographies of Quincy's great men would com- 
prise a studious winter's employment, but we, 
passing through the historic city, may hold 
up our fragment of a mirror and catch a bit of 
the procession. 

First and foremost, of course, will come 
President John Adams, he who, both before 
and after his term of high office, toiled ter- 
rifically in the public cause, being at the 
time of his election to Congress a member of 
ninety committees and a chairman of twenty- 
five ! We see him as the portraits have taught 
us to see him, with strong, serious face, — 
austere, but not harsh, — velvet coat, white 
ruffles, and white curls. He stands before us as 
the undisputed founder of what is now recog- 
nized as American diplomacy. Straightforward, 
sound to the core, unswerving, veracious, ex- 
emplifying in every act the candor of the Puri- 



SHIPBUILDING AT QUINCY 45 

tan, so congruous with the new simple life of 
a nation of common people. I think we shall 
like best to study him as he stands at the door 
of the little house in which he was born, and 
which, with its pitch roof, its antique door and 
eaves, is still preserved, close to the street, for 
public scrutiny. 

Next to President John Adams comes his 
son, John Quincy Adams, also a President of 
the United States. Spending much of his time 
abroad, the experience of those diplomatic 
years is graven upon features more subtly re- 
fined than those of his sire. But for all his 
foreign residence, he was, like his father, a 
Puritan in its most exalted sense; like him 
toiled all his life in public service, dying in the 
harness when rising to address the Speaker of 
the House. Him, too, we see best, standing at 
the door of his birthplace, a small cottage a 
stone's throw from the other cottage, sepa- 
rated only by a turnstile. Fresh white curtains 
hang in the small-paned windows; the grass is 
neatly trimmed, and like its quaint companion 
it is now open to the public and worth the 



46 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

tourist's call. Both these venerable cottages 
have inner walls, one of burnt, the other of un- 
burnt brick; and both are unusual in having 
no boards on the outer walls, but merely clap- 
boards fastened directly on to the studding 
with wrought-iron nails. 

Still another Adams follows, Charles Francis 
Adams. Although a little boy when he first 
comes into public view, a little boy occupying 
the conspicuous place as child of one President 
and grandchild of another, yet he was to win 
renown and honor on his own account as Am- 
bassador to England during the critical period 
of our Civil War. America remembers him 
best in this position. His firm old face with its 
white chin whiskers is a worthy portrait in the 
ancestral gallery. 

Although the political history of this coun- 
try may conclude its reference to the Adamses 
with these three famous figures, yet all New 
Englanders and all readers of biography would 
be reluctant to turn from this remarkable fam- 
ily without mention of the sons of Charles 
Francis Adams, two of whom have written. 



SHIPBUILDING AT QUINCY 47 

beside valuable historical works, autobiog- 
raphies so entertaining and so truly valuable 
for their contemporaneous portraits as to win 
a place of survival in our permanent literature. 

A member of the Adams family still lives in 
the comfortable home where the three first and 
most famous members all celebrated their 
golden weddings. This broad-fronted and hos- 
pitable house, built in 1730 by Leonard Vassal, 
a West India planter, for his summer residence, 
with its library finished in panels of solid ma- 
hogany, was confiscated when its Royalist 
owner fled at the outbreak of the Revolution, 
and John Adams acquired the property and 
left the pitch-roofed cottage down the street. 
The home of two Presidents, what tales it 
could tell of notable gatherings ! One must read 
the autobiography of Charles Francis Adams 
and "The Education of Henry Adams" to 
appreciate the charm of the succeeding mis- 
tresses of the noble homestead, and to enjoy 
in retrospect its many illustrious visitors. 

To have produced one family like the 
Adamses would surely be sufficient distinction 



48 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

for any one place, but the Adams family forms 
merely one unit in Quincy's unique procession 
of great men. 

The Quincy family, for which the town was 
named, and which at an early date intermarried 
with the Adamses, presents an almost parallel 
distinction. The first Colonel Quincy, he who 
lived like an English squire, a trifle irascible, 
to be sure, but a dignified and commanding 
figure withal, had fourteen children by his first 
wife and three by his second, so the family 
started off with the advantage of numbers as 
well as of blood. At the Quincy mansion house 
were bom statesmen, judges, and captains of 
war. The "Dorothy Q." of Holmes's poem first 
saw the light in it, and the Dorothy who be- 
came the bride of the dashing John Hancock 
blossomed into womanhood in it. Here were 
entertained times without number Sir Harry 
Vane, quaint Judge Sewall, Benjamin Franklin, 
and that couple who gleam through the annals 
of New England history in a never-fading 
flame of romance. Sir Harry Frankland and 
beautiful Agnes Surriage. The Quincy man- 



SHIPBUILDING AT QUINCY 49 

sion, which was built about 1635 by William 
Coddington of Boston and occupied by him 
until he was exiled for his religious opinions, 
was bought by Edmund Quincy. His grand- 
son, who bore his name, enlarged the house, 
and lived in it until his death when it de- 
scended to his son Edmund, the eminent jurist 
and father of Dorothy. The old-fashioned 
furniture, utensils and pictures, the broad hall, 
fine old stairv/ay with carved balustrades, and 
foreign wall-paper supposed to have been hung 
in honor of the approaching marriage of Dor- 
othy to John Hancock, are still preserved in 
their original place. Of the Quincy family, 
whose sedate jest it was that the estate de- 
scended from 'Siah to 'Siah, so frequent was 
the name " Josiah," the best known is perhaps 
the Josiah Quincy who was Mayor of Boston 
for six years and president of Harvard for six- 
teen. The portrait of his long, thin face is part 
of every New England history, and his busy, 
serene life, "compacted of Roman and Puritan 
virtues," is still upheld to all American chil- 
dren as a model of high citizenship. 



50 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

But not even the long line of the Quincy 
family completes the list of the town's great 
men. Henry Hope, one of the most brilliant 
financiers of his generation, and founder of a 
European banking house second only to that 
of the Rothchilds, was a native of Quincy. 
John Hull — who, as every school-child knows, 
on the day of his daughter's marriage to 
Judge Sewall, placed her in one of his weighing 
scales, and heaped enough new pine-tree shil- 
lings into the other to balance, and then pre- 
sented both to the bridegroom — held the 
first grant of land in the present town of 
Braintree (which originally included Quincy, 
Randolph, and Holbrook). 

From the picturesque union of John Hull's 
bouncing daughter Betsy and Judge Sewall 
sprang the extraordinary family of Sewalls 
which has given three chief justices to Mas- 
sachusetts, and one to Canada, and has been 
distinguished in every generation for the tal- 
ents and virtues of its members. In passing, 
we may note that it was this same John Hull 
who named Point Judith for his wife, little 



SHIPBUILDING AT QUINCY 51 

dreaming what a hete noir the place would 
prove to mariners in the years to come. 

There is another Quincy man whom it is 
pleasant to recall, and that is Henry Flynt, a 
whimsical and scholarly old bachelor, who 
was a tutor at Harvard for no less than fifty- 
three years, the one fixed element in the flow 
of fourteen college generations. One of the 
most accomplished scholars of his day, his in- 
fluence on the young men with whom he came 
in contact was stimulating to a degree, and 
they loved to repeat bits of his famous rep- 
artee. A favorite which has come down to us 
was on an occasion when Whitefield the reviv- 
alist declared in a theological discussion: "It 
is my opinion that Dr. Tillotson is now in hell 
for his heresy." To which Tutor Flynt retorted 
dryly: "It is my opinion that you will not 
meet him there." 

The procession of Quincy's great men which 
we have been watching winds its way, as hu- 
man processions are apt to do, to the old 
graveyard. Most of the original settlers are 
buried here, although not a few were buried on 



52 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

their own land, according to the common cus- 
tom. Probably this ancient burying ground, 
with its oldest headstone of 1663, has never 
been particularly attractive. The Puritans did 
not decorate their graveyards in any way. 
Fearing that prayers or sermons would encour- 
age the " superstitions " of the Roman Cath- 
olic Church, they shunned any ritual over the 
dead or beautifying of their last resting-place. 
However, neglected as the spot was, the old 
stone church, whose golden belfry is such a 
familiar and pleasant landmark to all the 
neighboring countryside, still keeps its face 
turned steadfastly toward it. The congested 
traflSc of the city square presses about its por- 
tico, but those who knew and loved it best lie 
quietly within the shadow of its gray walls. 
Under the portico lies President John Adams, 
and *'at his side sleeps until the trump shall 
sound, Abigail, his beloved and only wife." In 
the second chamber is placed the dust of his 
illustrious son, with "His partner for fifty 
years, Louisa Catherine " — she of whom 
Henry Adams wrote, "her refined figure; her 



SHIPBUILDING AT QUINCY 53 

gentle voice and manner; her vague effect of 
not belonging there, but to Washington or 
Europe, like her furniture and writing-desk 
with little glass doors above and little eight- 
eenth-century volumes in old binding." 

It has been called the "church of states- 
men," this dignified building, and so, indeed, 
might Quincy itself be called the "city of 
statesmen." It would be extremely interesting 
to study the reasons for Quincy's peculiar pro- 
ductiveness of noble public characters. The 
town was settled (as Braintree) exclusively by 
people from Devonshire and Lincolnshire and 
Essex. The laws of the Massachusetts Colony 
forbade Irish immigration — probably more 
for religious than racial reasons. On reading 
the ancient petition for the incorporation of 
the town one is struck by the fact that practi- 
cally every single name of the one hundred and 
fifty signers is English in origin, the few which 
were not having been anglicized. All of these 
facts point to a homogeneous stock, with the 
same language, traditions, and social customs. 
Obviously there is a connection between the 



54 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

governmental genius displayed by Quincy's 
sons and the singular purity of the original 
English stock. 

Little did Wampatuck, the son of Chicka- 
tawbut, realize what he was doing when he 
parted with his Braintree lands for twenty-one 
pounds and ten shillings. The Indian deed is 
still preserved, with the following words on its 
back: " In the 17th reign of Charles 2. Braintry 
Indian Deeds. Given 1665. Aug. 10: Take 
great care of it." 

Little did the Indian chief realize that the 
surrounding waters were to float hulks as 
mighty as a city; that the hills were to furnish 
granite for buildings and monuments without 
number; and that men were to be born there 
who would shape the greatest Ship of State the 
world has ever known. And yet, if he had 
known, possibly he would have accepted the 
twenty-one pounds and ten shillings just the 
same, and departed quietly. For the ships that 
were to be built would never have pleased him 
as well as his own canoe; the granite buildings 
would have stifled him; and the zealous 



SHIPBUILDING AT QUINCY 55 

Adamses and the high-minded Quincys and 
Sewalls and all the rest would have bored him 
horribly. Probably the only item in the whole 
history of Quincy which would have appealed 
to Wampatuck in the least would have been 
the floating down on a raft of the old Mollis 
Street Church of Boston, to become the Union 
Church of Weymouth and Braintree in 1810. 
This and the similar transportation of the 
Bowditch house from Beacon Street in Boston 
to Quincy a couple of years later would have 
fascinated the red man, as the recital of the 
feat fascinates us to-day. 

Those who care to learn more of Quincy will 
do well to read the autobiography of Charles 
Francis Adams and "The Education of Henry 
Adams." Those who care more for places than 
for descriptions of them may wander at will, 
finding beneath the surface of the modern city 
many landmarks of the old city which under- 
lies it. They may see the scaffolding of the 
great shipyards latticing themselves against 
the sky, and the granite quarries against the 
hills. They may see the little cottages and the 



56 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

great houses made famous by those who have 
passed over their thresholds; they may linger 
in the old burial ground and trace out the 
epitaphs under the portico of the golden- 
belfried church. But after they have touched 
and handled all of these things, they will not 
understand Quincy unless they look beyond 
and recognize her greatest contribution to this 
country — the noble statesmen who so bravely 
and intelligently toiled to construct America's 
Ship of State. 





CHAPTER IV 

THE ROMANCE OF WEYMOUTH 

THE paintings of John Constable, idyllic 
in their quietness, dewy in their seren- 
ity — how many travelers, how many lovers of 
art, superficial or profound, yearly seek out 
these paintings in the South Kensington Mu- 
seum or the Louvre, and stand before them 
wrapt in gentle ecstasy? 

The quality of Constable's pictures deline- 
ates in luminous softness a peculiarly lovely 
side of English rural life, but one need not 
travel to England or France to see this love- 
liness. Weymouth, that rambling stretch of 
towns and hamlets, of summer colony and sub- 
urb, possesses in certain areas bits of rural 



58 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

landscape as serene, as dewj% as idyllically 
tranquil as Constable at his best. 

Comparatively few people in New England, 
or out of it, know Weymouth well. Every one 
has heard of it, for it is next in age to the town 
of Plymouth itself, and every one who travels 
to the South Shore passes some section of it, 
for it extends lengthily — north and south, 
east and west — being the only town in Massa- 
chusetts to retain its original boundaries. And 
numbers of people are familiar with certain 
parts of it, for there are half a score of villages 
in the township, some of them summer settle- 
ments, some of them animated by an all-the- 
year-round life. But compared with the other 
towns along this historic route, Weymouth as 
a whole is little known and little appreciated. 
And yet the history of Weymouth is not with- 
out amusing and edifying elements, and the 
scenery of Weymouth is worthy of the detour 
that strangers rarely make. 

"Old Spain" is the romantic name for an 
uninteresting part of the township, and, con- 
versely. Commercial Street is the uninterest- 



THE ROMANCE OF WEYMOUTH 59 

ing name for a romantic part. It is along a 
highway stigmatized by such a name that one 
gets the ghmpses of a Constable country: 
glimpses of rolling meadows, of fertile groves, 
of cattle grazing in elm-shaded pastures, of a 
road winding contentedly among simple, an- 
cient cottages, and quiet, thrifty farms. These 
are the homes which belong, and have belonged 
for generations, to people who are neither rich 
nor poor; cozy, quaint, suggesting in an odd 
way the thatched-roof cottages of England. 
Not that all of Weymouth's homes are of this 
order. The Asa Webb Cowing house, which 
terminates Commercial Street within a stone's 
throw of the square of the town of Weymouth, 
is one of the very finest examples of the Colo- 
nial architecture in this country. The exquisite 
tracery and carving over and above the front 
door, and the white imported marble window 
lintels spin an elaborate and marvelously fine 
lacework of white over the handsome red- 
brick fagade. Although it is, alas, falling some- 
what into disrepair, perfect proportion and 
gemlike workmanship still stamp the vener- 



60 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

able mansion as one of patrician heritage. 
There are other excellent examples of archi- 
tecture in Weymouth, but the Cowing house 
must always be the star, both because of its 
extraordinary beauty and conspicuous posi- 
tion. Yes, if you want a characteristic glimpse 
of Weymouth, you cannot do better than to 
begin in front of this landmark, and drive down 
Commercial Street. Here for several smiling 
miles there is nothing — no ugly building large 
or small, no ruthless invasion of modernity to 
mar the mood of happy simplicity. Her beauty 
of beach, of sky, of river, Weymouth shares 
with other South Shore towns. Her perfection 
of idyllic rusticity is hers alone. 

Just as Weymouth's scenery is unlike that 
of her neighbors, so her history projects itself 
from an entirely different angle from theirs. 
While they were conceived by zealous. God- 
fearing men and women honestly seeking to 
establish homes in a new country, Weymouth 
was inadvertently born through the miscon- 
duct of a set of adventurers. Not every one 
who came to America in those significant early 



THE ROMANCE OF WEYMOUTH 61 

years came impelled by lofty motives. There 
were scapegraces, bad boys, rogues, mercena- 
ries, and schemers; and perhaps it is entirely 
logical that the winning natm*al loveliness of 
this place should have lured to her men who 
were not of the caliber to face more exposed, 
less fertile sections, and men to whom beauty 
made an especial appeal. 

The Indians early found Wessagusset, as 
they called it, an important rendezvous, as it 
was accessible by land and sea, and there were 
probably temporary camps there previous to 
1620, formed by fishermen and traders who 
visited the New England coast to traffic with 
the natives. But it was not until the arrival 
of Thomas Weston in 1622 that Weymouth's 
history really begins. And then it begins in a 
topsy-turvy way, so unlike Puritan New Eng- 
land that it makes us rub our eyes, wondering 
if it is really true. 

This Thomas Weston, who was a merchant 
adventurer of London, took it into his head to 
establish a colony in the new country entirely 
different from the Plymouth Colony. He had 



62 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

been an agent of the Pilgrims in their negotia- 
tions with the Plymouth Company, and when 
he broke off the connection it was to start a 
settlement which should combine all of the 
advantages, with none of the disadvantages, 
of the Plymouth Colony. First of all, it was 
to be a trading community pure and simple, 
with its object frankly to make money. Second, 
it was to be composed of men without families 
and familiar with hardship. And third, there 
was no religious motive or bond. That such an 
unidealistic enterprise should not flourish on 
American soil is worth noting. The disorderly, 
thriftless rabble, picked up from the London 
streets, soon got into trouble with the Indians 
and with neighboring colonists, and finally, 
undone by the results of their own improvi- 
dence and misbehavior, wailed that they 
"wanted to go back to London," to which end 
the Plymouth settlers willingly aided them, 
glad to get them out of the country. Thus 
ended the first inauspicious settlement of 
Weymouth. 

The second, which was undertaken shortly 



THE ROMANCE OF WEYMOUTH 63 

after by Robert Gorges, broke up the follow- 
ing spring, leaving only a few remnants behind. 
Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who was not a Span- 
iard as his name suggests, but a picturesque 
Elizabethan and a kinsman of Sir Walter 
Raleigh, essayed (through his son Robert) an 
experimental government along practically 
the same commercial lines as had Weston, and 
his failure was as speedy and complete as 
Weston's had been. 

A third attempt, while hardly more success- 
ful, furnishes one of the gayest and prettiest 
episodes in the whole history of New England. 
Across the somber procession of earnest-faced 
men and women, across the psalm-singing 
and the praying, across the incredible toil 
of the pioneers at Plymouth now flashes the 
brightly costumed and pleasure-loving courtier, 
Thomas Morton. An agent of Gorges, Mor- 
ton with thirty followers floated into Wessa- 
gusset to found a Royalist and Episcopalian 
settlement. This Episcopalian bias was quite 
enough to account for Bradford's disparaging 
description of him as a "kind of petie-fogie of 



64 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

Furnifells Inn," and explains why the early- 
historians never made any fuller or more favor- 
able record than absolutely necessary of these 
neighbors of theirs, although the churchman 
Samuel Maverick admits that Morton was a 
"gentleman of good qualitee." 

But it was for worse sins than his connec- 
tion with the Established Church that Mor- 
ton's name became synonymous with scandal 
throughout the whole Colony. In the very 
midst of the dun-colored atmosphere of Puri- 
tanism, in the very heart of the pious pioneer 
settlement this audacious scamp set up, ac- 
cording to Bradford, "a schoole of atheisme, 
and his men did quaff strong waters and com- 
port themselves as if they had anew revived 
and celebrated the feasts of y^ Roman Goddess 
Flora, or the beastly practises of y^ madd 
Bachanalians." The charge of atheism in this 
case seems based on the fact that Morton used 
the Book of Common Prayer, but as for the 
rest, there is no question that this band of 
silken merry-makers imported many of the 
carnival customs and hereditary pastimes of 



THE ROMANCE OF WEYMOUTH 65 

Old England to the stern young New England; 
that they fraternized with the Indians, shared 
their strong waters with them, and taught 
them the use of firearms; and that Merry- 
mount became indeed a scene of wildest 
revelry. 

The site of Merrymount had originally been 
selected by Captain Wollaston for a trading 
post. Imbued with the same mercenary motive 
which had proved fatal in the case of Weston 
and Gorges, Captain Wollaston, whose name 
is perpetuated in Mount Wollaston, brought 
with him in 1625 a gang of indented white 
servants. Finding his system of industry ill 
suited to the climate, he carried his men to 
Virginia, where he sold them. When he left, 
Morton took possession of the place and 
dubbed it *' Ma-re-mount." And then began 
the pranks which shook the Colony to its 
foundations. Picture to yourself a band of 
sworn triflers, dedicated to the wildest phi- 
losophy of pleasure, teaching bears to dance, 
playing blind-man's buff, holding juggling and 
boxing matches, and dancing. According to 



66 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

Hawthorne, on the eve of Saint John they 
felled whole acres of forests to make bonfires, 
and crowned themselves with flowers and 
threw the blossoms into the flames. At harvest- 
time they hilariously wasted their scanty store 
of Indian corn by making an image with the 
sheaves, and wreathing it with the painted 
garlands of autumn foliage. They crowned the 
King of Christmas and bent the knee to the 
Lord of Misrule ! Such fantastic foolery is in- 
conceivable in a Puritan community, and the 
Maypole which was its emblem was the most 
inconceivable of all. This "flower-decked 
abomination," ornamented with white birch 
bark, banners, and blossoms, was the center 
of the tipsy jollity of Merrymount. As Morton 
explains: '*A goodly pine tree of eighty foote 
was reared up, with a peare of bucks horns 
nayled on somewhere near to the top of it: 
where it stood as a faire sea mark for directions 
how to find out the way to mine host of Ma-re- 
mount." Around this famous, or infamous, 
pole Morton and his band frolicked with the 
Indians on May Day in 1627. As the indignant 



THE ROMANCE OF WEYMOUTH 67 

historian writes: "Unleashed pagans from the 
purHeus of the gross court of King James, 
danced about the Idoll of Merry Mount, join- 
ing hands with the lasses in beaver coats, and 
singing their ribald songs." 

It does n't look quite so heinous to us, this 
Maypole dancing, as it did to the outraged 
Puritans. In fact, the story of Morton and 
Merrymount is one of the few glistening 
threads in the somber weaving of those early 
days. But the New England soil was not pre- 
pared at that time to support any such exotic, 
and Myles Standish was sent to disperse the 
frivolous band, and to order Morton back to 
England, which he did, after a scrimmage 
which Morton relates with great vivacity and 
doubtful veracity in his "New English Ca- 
naan." 

This "New English Canaan," by the way, 
had a rather singular career. Morton tells in it 
many amusing stories, and one of them was 
destined to a remarkable perpetuity in English 
literature. The story deals with the Wessa- 
gusset settlers promising to hang one of their 



68 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

own members who had been caught steaUng — 
this hanging in order to appease the Indians. 
Morton gravely states that instead of hanging 
the real culprit, who was young and lusty, 
they hanged, in his place, another, old and 
sick. In his quaint diction: "You all agree that 
one must die, and one shall die, this young 
man's cloathes we will take off and put upon 
one that is old and impotent, a sickly person 
that cannot escape death, such is the disease 
on him confirmed, that die hee must. Put the 
young man's cloathes on this man, and let the 
sick person be hanged in the other's steade. 
Amen sayes one, and so sayes many more." 
This absurd notion of vicarious atonement, 
spun purely from Morton's imagination, ap- 
pealed to Samuel Butler as worthy of further 
elaboration. Morton's "New English Canaan" 
appeared in 1632. About thirty years later 
the second part of the famous English satire 
"Hudibras" appeared, embodying Morton's 
idea in altered but recognizable form, in what 
was the most popular English book of the day. 
This satire, appearing when the reaction against 



THE ROMANCE OF WEYMOUTH 69 

Puritanism was at its height, was accepted and 
solemnly deposited at the door of the good 
people of Boston and Plymouth ! And thus it 
was that Morton's fabricated tale of the Wey- 
mouth hanging passed into genuine history 
along with the "blue laws" of Connecticut. 
One cannot help believing that the mischievous 
perpetrator of the fable laughed up his sleeve 
at its result, and one cannot resist the thought 
that he was probably delighted to have the 
scandal attached to those righteous neighbors 
of his who had run him out of his dear Ma-re- 
mount. 

However, driven out he was: the Maypole 
about which the revelers had danced was 
hewed down by the stern zealots who believed 
in dancing about only one pole, and that the 
whipping-post. Merrymount was deserted. 

Certainly Weymouth, the honey spot which 
attracted not industrious bees, but only drones, 
was having a hard time getting settled ! It was 
not until the Reverend Joseph Hull received 
permission from the General Court to settle 
here with twenty-one families, from Wey- 



70 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

mouth, England, that the town was at last 
shepherded into the Puritan fold. 

These settlers, of good English stock and 
with the earnest ideals of pioneers, soon 
brought the community into good repute, and 
its subsequent life was as respectable and un- 
eventful as that of a reformed roue. In fact 
there is practically no more history for Wey- 
mouth. There are certainly no more raids upon 
merry-makers; no more calls from the cricket 
colony which had sung all summer on the 
banks of the river to the ant colony which had 
providently toiled on the shore of the bay; 
no more experimental governments; no more 
scandal. The men and women of the next five 
generations were a poor, hard-working race, 
rising early and toiling late. The men worked 
in the fields, tending the flocks, planting and 
gathering the harvest. The women worked in 
the houses, in the dairies and kitchens, at the 
spinning-wheel and washtub. The privations 
and loneliness, which are part of every strug- 
gling colony, were augmented here, where the 
houses did not cluster about the church and 



THE ROMANCE OF WEYMOUTH 71 

burial ground, but were scattered and far away. 
This peculiarity of settlement meant much in 
days where there was no newspaper, no sys- 
tem of public transportation, no regular post, 
and Europe was months removed. A few of 
the young men went with the fishing fleet to 
Cape Sable, or sailed on trading vessels to the 
West Indies or Spain, but it is doubtful if any 
Weymouth-born woman ever laid eyes on the 
mother country during the first hundred and 
fifty years. 

The records of the town are painfully dull. 
They are taken up by small domestic matters : 
the regulations for cattle; running boundary 
lines, locating highways, improving the town 
common, fixing fines for roving swine or agree- 
ing to the division of a whale found on the 
shore. There was more or less bickering over 
the salary of the town clerk, who was to receive 
thirty-three pounds and fourteen shillings 
yearly to keep "A free school and teach all 
children and servants sent him to read and 
write and cast accounts." 

Added to the isolation and pettiness of town 



72 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

affairs, the winters seem to have been longer, 
the snows deeper, the frosts more severe in 
those days. We have records of the harbor 
freezing over in November, and "in March 
the winter's snow, though much reduced, still 
lay on a level with the fences, nor was it until 
April that the ice broke up in Fore River." 
They were difficult — those days ushered in 
by the Reverend Joseph Hull. Through long 
nights and cold winters and an endless round 
of joyless living, Weymouth expiated well for 
the sins of her youth. Even as late as 1767 we 
read of the daughter of Parson Smith, of Wey- 
mouth — now the wife of John Adams, of 
Quincy — scrubbing the floor of her own bed- 
chamber the afternoon before her son — des- 
tined to become President of the United States, 
as his father was before him — was born. 

But the English stock brought in by the 
Reverend Hull was good stock. We may not 
envy the ladies scrubbing their own floors or 
the men walking to Boston, but many of the 
best families of this country are proud to trace 
their origin back to Weymouth. Maine, New 



THE ROMANCE OF WEYMOUTH 73 

Hampshire, and Vermont; then New York, 
Rhode Island, and Connecticut attracted men 
from Weymouth. Later the Middle West and 
the Far West called them. In fact for over a 
century the town hardly raised its number of 
population, so energetic was the youth it pro- 
duced. 

As happens with lamentable frequency, 
when Weymouth ceased to be naughty she 
also ceased to be interesting. After poring over 
the dull pages of the town history, one is some- 
times tempted to wonder if, perhaps, the irrev- 
erent Morton did not, for all his sins, divine a 
deeper meaning in this spot than the respect- 
able ones who came after him. One cannot 
read the "New English Canaan" without re- 
gretting a little that this happy-natured fellow 
was so unceremoniously bustled out of the 
country. Whatever Morton's discrepancies 
may have been, his response to beauty was 
lively and true : whatever his morals, his prose 
is delightful. All the town records and memo- 
rial addresses of all the good folk subsequent 
contain no such tribute to Weymouth, and 



74 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

paint no picture so true of that which is still 
best in her, as these loving words of the erst- 
while master of Merrymount. 

"And when I had more seriously considered 
the bewty of the place, with all her fair endow- 
ments, I did not think that in all the knowne 
world it could be paralel'd. For so many goodly 
groves of trees: dainty fine round rising hil- 
locks: delicate faire large plaines: sweete crys- 
tal fountains, and clear running streams, that 
twine in fine meanders through the meads, 
making so sweet a murmuring noise to heare, 
as would even lull the senses with delight 
asleep, so pleasantly doe they glide upon the 
pebble stones, jetting most jocundly where 
they doe meet; and hand in hand run down to 
Neptune's court, to pay the yearly tribute 
which they owe to him as soveraigne Lord of 
all the Springs." 








CHAPTER V 

ECCLESIASTICAL HINGHAM 

SHOULD you walk along the highway 
from Quincy to Hingham on a Sunday 
morning you would be passed by many auto- 
mobiles, for the Old Coast Road is now one of 
the great pleasure highways of New England. 
Many of the cars are moderately priced affairs, 
the tonneau well filled with children of mis- 
cellaneous ages, and enlivened by a family dog 
or two — for this is the way that the average 
American household spends its modern Sab- 
bath holiday. Now and then a limousine, ex- 
quisite in workmanship within and without, 
driven by a chauffeur in livery and tenanted 



76 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

by a single languid occupant, rolls noiselessly 
past. A strange procession, indeed, for a road 
originally marked by the moccasined feet of 
Indians, and widened gradually by the toil- 
some journeyings of rough Colonial carts and 
coaches. 

It is difficult to say which feature of the 
steadily moving travel would most forcibly 
strike the original Puritan settlers of the town : 
the fact that even the common man — the 
poor man — could own such a vehicle of speed 
and ease, or the fact that America — such a 
short time ago a wilderness — could produce, 
not as the finest flower on its tree of evolution, 
but certainly as its most exotic, the plutocrat 
who lives in a palace with fifty servants to do 
his bidding, and the fine lady whose sole exer- 
cise of her mental and physical functions con- 
sists in allowing her maid to dress her. Yes, 
New England has changed amazingly in the 
revolutions of three centuries, and here, under 
the shadow of this square plain building — 
Hingham's Old Ship Church — while we pause 
to watch the Sunday pageant of 1920, we can 







7 --^^^^^--^ 



ECCLESIASTICAL HINGHAM 77 

most easily call back the Sabbath rites, and 
the ideals which created those rites, three cen- 
turies ago. 

It is the year of 168 L This wooden meeting- 
house, with the truncated pyramidal roof and 
belfry (to serve as a lookout station), has just 
been built. A stage ahead, architecturally, of 
the log meeting-house with clay-filled chinks, 
thatched roof, oiled-paper windows, earthen 
floor, and a stage behind the charming steeple 
style made popular by Sir Christopher Wren, 
and now multiplied in countless graceful ex- 
amples all over New England, the Old Ship is 
entirely unconscious of the distinction which 
is awaiting it — the distinction of being the 
oldest house for public worship in the United 
States which still stands on its original site, 
and which is still used for its original purpose. 
In the year 1681 it is merely the new meeting- 
house of the little hamlet of Hingham. The 
people are very proud of their new building. 
The timbers have been hewn with the broad- 
axe out of solid white pine (the marks are still 
visible, particularly in those rafters of the 



78 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

roof open to the attic). The belfry is precisely 
in the center of the four-sided pitched roof. To 
be sure this necessitates ringing the bell from 
one of the pews, but a little later the bell- 
ringer will stand above, and through a pane of 
glass let into the ceiling he will be able to see 
when the minister enters the pulpit. The orig- 
inal backless benches were replaced by box 
pews with narrow seats like shelves, hung on 
hinges around three sides, but part of the 
original pulpit remains and a few of the box 
pews. In 1681 the interior, like the exterior, is 
sternly bare. No paint, no decorations, no col- 
ored windows, no organ, or anything which 
could even remotely suggest the color, the 
beauty, the formalism of the churches of Eng- 
land. The unceiled roof shows the rafters 
whose arched timbers remind one that ships' 
carpenters have built this house of God. 

This, then, is the meeting-house of 1681. 
What of the services conducted there? 

In the first place, they are well attended. 
And why not, since in 1635 the General Court 
decreed that no dwelling should be placed 



ECCLESIASTICAL HINGHAM 79 

more than half a mile away from the meeting- 
house of any new "plantation" — thus elim- 
inating the excuse of too great distance? Every 
one is expected, nay, commanded, to come to 
church. In fact, after the tolling of the last 
bell, the houses may all be searched — each 
ten families is under an inspector — if there is 
any question of delinquents hiding in them. 
And so in twos and threes, often the man 
trudging ahead with his gun and the woman 
carrjdng her baby while the smaller children 
cling to her skirts, sometimes man and woman 
and a child or two on horseback, no matter 
how wild the storm, how swollen the streams, 
how deep the whirling snow — they all come 
to church : old folk and infants as well as adults 
and children. The congregation either waits 
for the minister and his wife outside the door, 
or stands until he has entered the pulpit. Once 
inside they are seated with the most meticu- 
lous exactness, according to rank, age, sex, and 
wealth. The small boys are separated from 
their families and kept in order by tithing-men 
who allow no wandering eyes or whispered 



80 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

words. The deacons are in the "fore" seats; 
the elderly people are sometimes given chairs 
at the end of the "pues"; and the slaves and 
Indians are in the rear. To seat one's self in 
the wrong "pue" is an offense punishable by 
a fine. 

"Here is the church, and here are the peo- 
ple," as the old rhyme has it. What then of the 
services ? That they are interminable we know. 
The tithing-man or clerk may turn the brass- 
bound hourglass by the side of the pulpit two 
and three times during the sermon, and once 
or twice during the prayer. Interminable, and, 
also, to the modern Sunday observer, unen- 
durable. How many of us of this softer age can 
contemplate without a shiver the vision of 
people sitting hour after hour in an absolutely 
unheated building? (The Old Ship was not 
heated until 1822.) The only relief from the 
chill and stiffness comes during the prayer 
when the congregation stands: kneeling, of 
course, would savor too strongly of idolatry 
and the Church of Rome. They stand, too, 
while the psalms and hymns are lined out, and 



ECCLESIASTICAL HINGHAM 81 

as they sing them, very uncertainly and very 
incorrectly. This performance alone sometimes 
takes an hour, as there is no organ, nor notes, 
and only a few copies of the Bay Psalm Book, 
of which, by the way, a copy now would be 
worth many times its weight in gold. 

After the morning service there is a noon 
intermission, in which the half-frozen con- 
gregation stirs around, eats cold luncheons 
brought in baskets, and then returns to the 
next session. One must not for an instant, 
however, consider these noon hours as recre- 
ational. There is no idle talk or play. The ser- 
mon is discussed and the children forbidden 
to romp or laugh. One sometimes wonders how 
the little things had any impulse to laugh in 
such an abysmal atmosphere, but apparently 
the Puritan boys and girls were entirely nor- 
mal and even wholesomely mischievous — as 
proved by the constantly required services of 
the tithing-man. 

These external trappings of the service sound 
depressing enough, but if the message received 
within these chilly walls is cheering, maybe we 



82 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

can forget or ignore the physical discomforts. 
But is the message cheering? Hell, damnation, 
eternal tortures, painful theological hair-split- 
tings, harrowing self -examinations, and humil- 
iating public confessions — this is what they 
gather on the narrow wooden benches to listen 
to hour after hour, searching their souls for sin 
with an almost frenzied eagerness. And yet, 
forlorn and tedious as the bleak service appears 
to us, there is no doubt that these stern-faced 
men and women wrenched an almost mystical 
inspiration from it; that a weird fascination 
emanated from this morbid dwelling on sin 
and punishment, appealing to the emotions 
quite as vividly — although through a differ- 
ent channel — as the most elaborate cere- 
monial. When the soul is wrought to a certain 
pitch each hardship is merely an added oppor- 
tunity to prove its faith. It was this high 
pitch, attained and sustained by our Puritan 
fathers, which produced a dramatic and some- 
times terrible blend of personality. 

It has become the modern fashion somewhat 
to belittle Puritanism. It is easy to emphasize 



ECCLESIASTICAL HINGHAM 83 

its absurdities, to ridicule the almost fanatical 
fervor which goaded men to harshness and in- 
consistency. The fact remains that a tremen- 
dous selective force was needed to tear the 
Puritans away from the mother church and 
the mother country and fortify them in their 
struggle in a new land. It was religious zeal 
which furnished this motive power. Different 
implements and differently directed force are 
needed to extract the diamond from the earth, 
from the implements and force needed to 
polish and cut the same diamond. So different 
phases of religious development are called 
forth by progressive phases of development. 
It has been said about the New England con- 
science: "It fostered a condition of life and 
type of character doubtless never again pos- 
sible in the world's history. Having done its 
work, having founded soundly and peopled 
strongly an exceptional region, the New Eng- 
land conscience had no further necessity for 
being. Those whom it now tortures with its 
hot pincers of doubt and self-reproach are 
sacrificed to a cause long since won," 



84 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

The Puritans themselves grew away from 
many of their excessive severities. But as 
they gained bodily strength from their conflict 
with the elements, so they gained a certain 
moral stamina by their self-imposed religious 
observance. And this moral stamina has 
marked New England ever since, and marked 
her to her glory. 

One cannot speak of Hingham churches — 
indeed, one cannot speak of Hingham — with- 
out admiring mention of the New North 
Church. This building, of exquisite propor- 
tions and finish, within and without, built by 
Bulfinch in 1806, is one of the most flawless 
examples of its type on the South Shore. You 
will appreciate the cream-colored paint, the 
buff walls, the quaint box pews of oiled wood, 
with handrails gleaming from the touch of 
many generations, with wooden buttons and 
protruding hinges proclaiming an ancient 
fashion; but the unique feature of the New 
North Church is its slave galleries. These two 
small galleries, between the roof and the choir 
loft, held for thirty years, in diminishing num- 



ECCLESIASTICAL HINGHAM 85 

bers, negroes and Indians. The last occupant 
was a black Lucretia, who, after being freed, 
was invited to sit downstairs with her master 
and mistress, which she did, and which she 
continued to do until her death, not so very 
long ago. 

Hingham, its Main Street — alas for the 
original name of "Bachelors Rowe" — arched 
by a double row of superb elms on either side, 
is incalculably rich in old houses, old tra- 
ditions, old families. Even motoring through, 
too quickly as motorists must, one cannot help 
being struck by the substantial dignity of the 
place, by the well-kept prosperity of the houses, 
large and small, which fringe the fine old high- 
way. Ever since the days when the three 
Misses Barker kept loyal to George IV, claim- 
ing the King as their liege lord fifty years after 
the Declaration of Independence, the town has 
preserved a Cranford-like charm. And why 
not, when the very house is still handsomely 
preserved, where the nameless nobleman, 
Francis Le Baron, was concealed between the 
floors, and, as we are told in Mrs. Austen's 



86 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

novel, very properly capped the climax by 
marrying his brave little protector, Molly 
Wilder? Why not, when the Lincoln family, 
ancestors of Abraham, has been identified 
with the town since its settlement? The house 
of Major-General Benjamin Lincoln, who re- 
ceived the sword of Cornwallis at Yorktown, 
is still occupied by his descendants, its neat 
fence, many windows, two chimneys, and its 
two stories and a half proclaiming it a dwell- 
ing of repute. Near by, descendants of Samuel 
Lincoln, the ancestor of Abraham, occupy part 
of another roomy ancient homestead. The 
Wampatuck Club, named after the Indian 
chief who granted the original deeds of the 
town, has found quarters in an extremely in- 
teresting house dating from 1G80. In the 
spacious living-room are seventeen panels, on 
the walls and in the doors, painted with charm- 
ing old-fashioned skill by John Hazlitt, the 
brother of the English essayist. The Reverend 
Daniel Shute house, built in 1746, is practi- 
cally intact with its paneled rooms and wall- 
paper a hundred years old. Hingham's famous 



ECCLESIASTICAL HINGHAM 87 

elms shade the house where Parson Ebenezer 
Gay Hved out his long pastorate of sixty -nine 
years and nine months, and the Garrison 
house, built before 1640, sheltered, in its 
prime, nine generations of the same family. 
The Rainbow Roof house, so called from the 
delicious curve in its roof, is one of Hingham's 
prettiest two-hundred-year-old cottages, and 
Miss Susan B. Willard's cottage is one of the 
oldest in the United States. Derby Academy, 
founded almost two centuries and a half ago 
by Madam Derby, still maintains its social and 
scholarly prestige through all the educational 
turmoil of the twentieth century. One likes 
to associate Hingham with Massachusetts's 
stanch and sturdy" war governor," for it was 
here that John Albion Andrew, who proved 
himself so truly one of our great men during 
the Civil War, courted Eliza Jones Hersey, 
and here that the happy years of their early 
married life were spent. Later, another gov- 
ernor, John D. Long, was for many years a 
mighty figure in the town. 

With its ancient churches and institutions. 



88 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

its pensive graveyards and lovely elms, its 
ancestral houses and hidden gardens, Hingham 
typifies what is quaintest and best in New Eng- 
land towns. Possibly the dappling of the elms, 
possibly the shadow of the Old Ship Church, 
is a bit deeper here than in the other South 
Shore towns. However it may seem to its in- 
habitants, to the stranger everything in Hing- 
ham is tinctured by the remembrance of the 
stern old ecclesiasticism. Even the number of 
historic forts seems a proper part of those 
righteous days, for when did religion and war- 
fare not go hand in hand.^ During the trouble 
with King Philip the town had three forts, one 
at Fort Hill, one at the Cemetery, and one "on 
the plain about a mile from the harbor"; and 
the sites may still be identified. 

Not that Hingham history is exclusively 
religious or martial. Her little harbor once 
held seventy sail of fishing vessels, and be- 
tween 1815 and 1826, 165,000 barrels of mack- 
erel were landed on their salty decks. For fifty 
years (between 1811 and 1860) the Rapid 
sailed as a packet between this town and Bos- 



ECCLESIASTICAL HINGHAM 89 

ton, making the trip on one memorable occa- 
sion in sixty-seven minutes. We read that in 
the War of 1812 she was carried up the Wey- 
mouth River and covered, masts and hull, 
with green bushes so that the marauding 
British cruisers might not find her, and as 
we read we find ourselves remembering that 
camouflage is new only in name. 

How entirely fitting it seems that a town of 
such venerable houses and venerable legends 
should be presided over by a church which is 
the oldest of its kind in the country! 

Hingham changes. There is a Roman Catho- 
lic Church in the very heart of that one-time 
Puritan stronghold: the New North is Unita- 
rian, and Episcopalians, Baptists, and Second 
Adventists have settled down comfortably 
where once they would have been run out of 
town. Poor old Puritans, how grieved and 
scandalized they would be to stand, as we are 
standing now, and watch the procession of 
passing automobilists ! Would it seem all lost 
to them, we wonder, the religious ideal for 
which they struggled, or would they realize 



90 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

that their sowing had brought forth richer 
fruit than they could guess? It has all changed, 
since Puritan days, and yet, perhaps, in no 
other place in New England does the hand of 
the past lie so visibly upon the community. 
You cannot lift your eyes but they rest upon 
some building raised two centuries and more 
ago; the shade which ripples under your feet 
is cast by elms planted by that very hand of 
the past. Even your voice repeats the words 
which those old patriarchs, well versed in 
Biblical lore, chose for their neighborhood 
names. Accord Pond and Glad Tidings Plain 
might have been lifted from some Pilgrim's 
Progress, while the near-by Sea of Galilee and 
Jerusalem Road are from the Good Book 
itself. 

"Which way to Egypt?" Is this an echo 
from that time when the Bible was the cor- 
nerstone of Church and State, of home and 
school? 

"What's the best road to Jericho Beach?" 
Surely it is some grave-faced shade who calls: 
or is it a peal from the chimes in the Memorial 



ECCLESIASTICAL HINGHAM 91 

Bell Tower — chimes reminiscent of old Hing- 
ham, in England? No, it is only the shouted 
question of the motorist, gay and prosperous, 
flying on his Sunday holiday through ancient 
Hingham town. 





CHAPTER VI 

COHASSET LEDGES AND MARSHES ^ 

A SICKLE-SHAPED shore — wild, su- 
perb ! Tawny ledges tumbling out to sea, 
rearing massive heads to search, across three 
thousand miles of water, for another shore. For 
it is Spain and Portugal which lie directly yon- 
der, and the same tumultuous sea that crashes 
and swirls against Cohasset's crags laps also 
on those sunnier, warmer sands. 

Back inland, from the bold brown coast 
which gives Cohasset her Riviera-like fame, 
lie marshes, liquefying into mirrors at high 
tide, melting into lush green at low tide. 

* For much of this chapter I am indebted to my friend 
Alice C. Hyde. 



COHASSET LEDGES 93 

Between the ledges and the marshes winds 
Jerusalem Road, bearing a continual stream 
of sight-seers and fringed with estates hidden 
from the sight-seers; estates with terraces 
dashed by spindrift, with curving stairways 
hewn in sheer rock down to the water, with 
wind-twisted savins, and flowers whose bright 
bloom is heightened by the tang of salt. For 
too many a passing traveler Cohasset is known 
only as the most fashionable resort on the 
South Shore. But Cohasset's story is a longer 
one than that, and far more profound. 

Cohasset is founded upon a rock, and the 
making of that rock is so honestly and minutely 
recorded by nature that even those who take 
alarm at the word "geology" may read this 
record with ease. These rocky ledges that stare 
so proudly across the sea underlie, also, every 
inch of soil, and are of the same kind every- 
where — granite. Granite is a rock which is 
formed under immense pressure and in the 
presence of confined moisture, needing a weight 
of fifteen thousand pounds upon every inch. 
Therefore, wherever granite is found we know 



94 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

that it has not been formed by deposit, like 
limestone and sandstone and slate and other 
sedimentary rocks, but at a prodigious depth 
under the solid ground, and by slow crystal- 
lizing of molten substances. There must have 
been from two to five miles of other rock 
lying upon the stuff that crystallized into 
granite. A wrinkling in the skin of the earth 
exposed the granite, a wrinkling so gradual 
that doubtless if generations of men had lived 
on top of the wrinkle they would have sworn 
it did not move. But move it did, and the 
superimposed rock must have been worn off 
at a rate of less than a hundredth part of an 
inch every year in order to lose two or three 
miles of it in twenty-five million years. As the 
granite was wrinkled up by the movement of 
the earth's crust, certain cracks opened and 
filled with lava, forming dikes. The geologist 
to-day can glance at these dikes and tell the 
period of their formation as casually as a 
jockey looking at a horse's mouth can tell his 
age. He could also tell of the "faulting," or 
slipping down, of adjacent masses of solid 



COHASSET LEDGES 95 

rock, which has occurred often enough to carve 
the characteristic Cohasset coast. 

The making of the rock bottom is a story 
which extends over miUions of years : the mak- 
ing of the soil extends over thousands. The 
gigantic glacier which once formed all over 
the northern part of North America, and which 
remained upon it most of the time until about 
seven thousand years ago, ground up the rock 
like a huge mill and heaped its grist into hills 
and plains and meadows. The marks of it are 
as easy to see as finger prints in putty. There 
are scratches on the underlying rock in every 
part of the town, pointing in the southerly 
direction in which the glacier moved. The 
gravel and clay belts of the town have all 
been stretched out in the same direction as 
the scratches, and many are the boulders which 
were combed out of the moving glacier by the 
peaks of the ledges, and are now poised, like 
the famous Tipping Rock, just where the 
glacier left them when it melted. Few towns 
in America possess greater geological interest 
or a wider variety of glacial phenomena than 



96 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

Cohasset — all of which may be studied more 
fully with the aid of E. Victor Bigelow's "Nar- 
rative History of the Town of Cohasset, Mas- 
sachusetts," and William O. Crosby's "Geol- 
ogy of the Boston Basin." 

This, then, is briefly the first part of Co- 
hasset's ledges. The second part deals with 
human events, including many shipwrecks and 
disasters, and more than one romantic episode. 
Perhaps this human section is best begun 
with Captain John Smith. 

Captain John Smith was born too early. If 
ever a hero was brought into the world to 
adorn the moving-picture screen, that hero of 
the "iron collar," of piratical capture, of wed- 
lock with an Indian princess, was the man. 
Failing of this high calling he did some service- 
able work in discovering and describing many 
of the inlets on the coast of New England. 
Among these inlets Cohasset acted her part as 
hostess to the famous navigator and staged a 
small and vivid encounter with the aborigines. 
The date of this presentation was in 1614; the 
scenario may be found in Smith's own diary. 



COHASSET LEDGES 97 

Smith and a party of eight or more sailors 
made the trip between the ledges in a small 
rowboat. It is believed that they landed some- 
where near Hominy Point. Their landing was 
not carried out without some misadventure, 
however, for in some way this party of ex- 
plorers angered the Indians with whom they 
came in contact, and the result was an attack 
from bow and arrow. The town of Cohasset, 
in commemorating this encounter by a tablet, 
has inscribed upon the tablet Smith's own 
words: 

*'We found the people on those parts very 
kind, but in their fury no less valiant: and at 
Quonhaset falling out there with but one of 
them, he with three others crossed the harbour 
in a cannow to certain rocks whereby we must 
pass, and there let flie their arrowes for our 
shot, till we were out of danger, yet one of 
them was slaine, and the other shot through 
the thigh." 

History follows fast along the ledges : history 
of gallant deeds and gallant defense during the 
days of the Revolution and the War of 1812; 



98 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

deeds of disaster along the coast and one es- 
pecial deed of great engineering skill. 

The beauty and the tragedy of Cohasset are 
caught in large measure upon these jagged 
rocks. The splinters and wrecks of two and a 
half centuries have strewn the beaches, and 
many a corpse, far from its native land, has 
been found, wrapped in a shroud of seaweed 
upon the sand, and has been lowered by alien 
hands into a forever unmarked grave. Quite 
naturally the business of "wrecking" — that 
is, saving the pieces — came to be the trade 
of a number of Cohasset citizens, and so ex- 
pert did Cohasset divers and seamen become 
that they were in demand all over the world. 
One of the most interesting salvage enter- 
prises concerned a Spanish frigate, sunk off 
the coast of Venezuela. Many thousand dollars 
in silver coin were covered by fifty feet of 
water, and it was Captain Tower, of Co- 
hasset, with a crew of Cohasset divers and 
seamen, who set sail for the spot in a schooner 
bearing the substantial name of Eliza Ann. 
The Spanish Government, having no faith in 



COHASSET LEDGES 99 

the enterprise, agreed to claim only two and 
one half per cent of what was removed. The 
first year the wreckers got fourteen thousand 
dollars, and the second they had reached seven 
thousand, when the Spaniards became so 
jealous of their skill that they had to flee for 
their lives (taking the seven thousand, how- 
ever). The clumsy diving-bell method was the 
only one known at that time, but when, 
twenty years later, the Spaniards had to 
swallow their chagrin and send again for the 
same wrecking party to assist them on the 
same task, modern diving suits were in use and 
more money was recovered — no mean tri- 
umph for the crew of the Eliza Ann! 

As the wrecks along the Cohasset coast were 
principally caused by the dangerous reefs 
spreading in either direction from what is 
known as Minot's Ledge, the necessity of a 
lighthouse on that spot was early evident, and 
the erecting of the present Minot's Light is 
one of the most romantic engineering enter- 
prises of our coast history. The original struc- 
ture was snapped off like a pikestaff in the 



100 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

great storm of 1851, and the present one of 
Quincy granite is the first of its kind in Amer- 
ica to be built on a ledge awash at high tide 
and with no adjacent dry land. The tre- 
mendous difficulties were finally overcome, al- 
though in the year 1855 the work could be 
pursued for only a hundred and thirty hours, 
and the following year for only a hundred and 
fifty-seven. To read of the erection of this 
remarkable lighthouse reminds one of the 
building of Solomon's temple. The stone was 
selected with the utmost care, and the Quincy 
cutters declared that such chiseling had never 
before left the hand of man. Then every single 
block for the lower portion was meticulously 
cut, dovetailed, and set in position on Govern- 
ment Island in Cohasset Harbor. The old base, 
exquisitely laid, where they were thus set up is 
still visible, as smooth as a billiard table, al- 
though grass-covered. In addition to the flaw- 
less cutting and joining of the blocks, the ledge 
itself was cut into a succession of levels suitable 
to bear a stone foundation — work which was 
possible only at certain times of the tide and 



COHASSET LEDGES 101 

seasons of the year. The cutting of each stone 
so that it exactly fitted its neighbor, above, 
below, and at either side, and precisely con- 
formed to the next inner row upon the same 
level, was nothing short of a marvel. A min- 
iature of the light — the building of which 
took two winters, and which was on the scale 
of an inch to a foot — was in the United States 
Government Building at the Chicago Expo- 
sition, and is stone for stone a counterpart of 
the granite tower in the Atlantic. Although 
this is an achievement which belongs in a 
sense to the whole United States, yet it must 
always seem, to those who followed it most 
closely, as belonging peculiarly to Cohasset. 
A famous Cohasset rigger made the model for 
the derrick which was used to raise the stones ; 
the massive granite blocks were teamed by 
one whose proud boast it was that he had 
never had occasion to shift a stone twice; a 
Cohasset man captained the first vessel to 
carry the stone to the ledge, and another as- 
sisted in the selection of the stone. 

It is difficult to turn one's eyes away from 



102 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

the spectacular beauty of the Cohasset shore, 
but magnificent as these ledges are, and glit- 
tering with infinite romance, yet, rather curi- 
ously, it is on the limpid surface of the marshes 
that we read the most significant episodes of 
Colonial and pioneer life. 

One of the needs which the early settlers 
were quick to feel was open land which would 
serve as pasturage for their cattle. With forests 
pressing down upon them from the rear, and 
a barrier of granite in front of them, the prob- 
lem of grazing-lands was important. The 
Hingham settlement at Bare Cove (Cohasset 
was part of Hingham originally) found the 
solution in the acres of open marshland which 
stretched to the east. Cohasset to-day may 
ask where so much grazing-land lay within her 
borders. By comparison with the old maps and 
surveying figures, we find that many acres, 
now covered with the water of Little Harbor 
and lying within the sandbar at Pleasant 
Beach, are counted as old grazing-lands. These, 
with the sweep of what is now the " Glades," 
furnished abundant pasturage for neighboring 



COHASSET LEDGES 103 

cattle and brought the Hingham settlers 
quickly to Cohasset meadows. Thus it happens 
that the first history of Cohasset is the history 
of this common pasturage — "Commons," as 
it was known in the old histories. Although 
Hingham was early divided up among the 
pioneers, the marshes were kept undivided for 
the use of the whole settlement. As a record of 
1650 puts it: "It was ordered that any towns- 
man shall have the liberty to put swine to 
Conohasset without yokes or rings, upon the 
town's common land." 

But the Massachusetts Bay Colony was 
hard-headed as well as pious, and several naive 
hints creep into the early records of sharers of 
the Commons who were shrewdly eyeing the 
salt land of Cohasset. A real estate transfer of 
1640 has this potential flavor: "Half the lot at 
Conehasset, if any fall by lot, and half the 
commons which belong to said lot." And again, 
four years later, Henry Tuttle sold to John 
Fearing "what right he had to the Division of 
Conihassett Meadows." The first land to come 
under the measuring chain and wooden stake 



104 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

of surveyors was about the margin of Little 
Harbor about the middle of the seventeenth 
century. After that the rest of the township 
was not long in being parceled out. One of the 
curious methods of land division was in the 
Beechwood district. The apportionment seems 
to have had the characteristics of ribbon cake. 
Sections of differing desirability — to meet 
the demands of justice and natural conditions 
— were measured out in long strips, a mile 
long and twenty-five feet wide. Many an old 
stone wall marking this early grant is still to 
be seen in the woods. Could anything but the 
indomitable spirit of those English settlers and 
the strong feeling for land ownership have 
built walls of carted stone about enclosures a 
mile long and twenty-five feet wide.f^ 

Having effected a division of land in Co- 
hasset, families soon began to settle away 
from the mother town of Hingham, and after 
a prolonged period of government at arm's 
length, with all its attendant discomforts, the 
long, bitter struggle resolved itself into Co- 
hasset's final separation from Hingham, and 



COHASSET LEDGES 105 

its development from a precinct into an inde- 
pendent township. 

While the marshes to the north were the 
cause of Cohasset being first visited, settled, 
and made into a township, yet the marshes to 
the south hold an even more vital historical 
interest. These southern marshes, bordering 
Bound Brook and stretching away to Bassing 
Beach, were visited by haymakers as were 
those to the north. But these haymakers did 
not come from the same township, nor were 
they under the same local government. The 
obscure little stream which to-day lies be- 
tween Scituate Harbor and Cohasset marks 
the line of two conflicting grants — the Ply- 
mouth Colony and the Massachusetts Bay 
Colony. 

In the early days of New England royal 
grants from the throne or patents from colo- 
nial councils in London were deemed necessary 
before settling in the wilderness. The strong, 
inherited respect for landed estates must have 
given such charters their value, as it is hard for 
us to see now how any one in England could 



106 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

have prevented the pioneers from setthng 
where they pleased. The various patents and 
grants of the two colonies (indefinite as they 
seem to us now, as some granted "up to" a 
hundred acres to each emigrant without de- 
fining any boundaries) brought the two colo- 
nies face to face at Bound Brook. The re- 
sult was a dispute over the harvesting of salt 
hay. 

All boundary streams attract to themselves 
a certain amount of fame — the Rio Grande, 
the Saint Lawrence, and the Rhine. But surely 
the little stream of Bound Brook, which was 
finally taken as the line of division between 
two colonies of such historical importance as 
the Plymouth and the Massachusetts Bay, is 
worth more than a superficial attention. The 
dispute lasted many years and occasioned the 
appointing of numerous commissioners from 
both sides. That the salt grass of Bassing 
Beach should have assumed such importance 
reveals again the sensitiveness to land values 
of men who had so recently left England. The 
settling of the dispute was not referred back to 



COHASSET LEDGES 107 

England, but was settled by the colonists 
themselves. 

The author of the "Narrative History of 
Cohasset" calls this an event of only less 
historical importance than that of the pact 
drawn up in the cabin of the Mayflower. He 
declares that the confederation of states had 
its inception there, and adds: "The appoint- 
ment for this joint commission for the settle- 
ment of this intercolonial difficulty was the 
first step of federation that culminated in the 
Colonial Congress and then blossomed into 
the United States." We to-day, to whom the 
salt grass of Cohasset is little more than a 
fringe about the two harbors, may find it difii- 
cult to agree fully with such a sweeping state- 
ment, but certainly this spot and boundary 
line should always be associated with the re- 
spect for property which has ennobled the 
Anglo-Saxon race. 

Between the marshes, which were of such 
high importance in those early days, and the 
ledges which have been the cause and the scene 
of so many Cohasset adventures, twists Jeru- 



108 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

salem Road, the brilliant beauty of which has 
been so often — but never too often — re- 
marked. This was the main road from Hing- 
ham for many years, and it took full three 
hours of barbarous jolting in two-wheeled, 
springless ox carts to make the trip. Even if a 
man had a horse the journey was cruelly tedi- 
ous, for there were only a few stretches where 
the horse could go faster than a walk — and 
the way was pock-marked with boulders and 
mudholes. With no stage-coach before 1815, 
and being off the highway between Plymouth 
and Boston, it is small wonder that the early 
Cohasset folk either walked or went by sea to 
Hingham and thence to Boston. 

It has been suggested that the "keeper of 
young cattle at Coneyhassett," who drove his 
herd over from Hingham, was moved either 
by piety or sarcasm to give the trail its present 
arresting name. However, as the herdsman did 
not take this route, but the back road through 
Turkey Meadows, it is more probable that 
some visitors, who detected a resemblance be- 
tween this section of the country and the Holy 



COHASSET LEDGES 109 

Land, were responsible for the christening of 
this road and also of the Sea of Galilee — which 
last has almost dropped into disuse. There 
does not seem to be any particular suggestion 
of the land of the Pharaohs and present-day 
Egypt, but tradition explains that as follows: 
Old Squire Perce had accumulated a store of 
grain in case of drought, and when the drought 
came and the men hurried to him to buy corn, 
he greeted them with "Well, boys, so you've 
come down to Egypt to buy corn." Another 
proof, if one were needed, of the Biblical 
familiarity of those days. 

It is hard to stop writing about Cohasset. 
There are so many bits of history tucked into 
every ledge and cranny of her shore. The green 
in front of the old white meeting-house — one 
of the prettiest and most perfect meeting- 
houses on the South Shore — has been pressed 
by the feet of men assembling for six wars. It 
makes Cohasset seem venerable, indeed, when 
one thinks of the march of American history. 
But to the tawny ledges, tumbling out to sea, 
these three hundred years are as but a day ; for 



110 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

the story of the stones, Uke the story of the 
stars, is measured in terms of milhards. To such 
immemorial keepers of the coast the hfe of man 
is a brief tale that is soon told, and fades as 
swiftly as the fading leaf. 











CHAPTER VII 

THE SCITUATE SHORE 

SCITUATE is different: different from 
Cohasset, with its superbly bold coast and 
its fashionable folk; different from Hingham, 
with its air of settled inland dignity. Scituate 
has a quaintness, a casualness, the indescrib- 
able air of a land's-end spot. The fine houses 
in Scituate are refreshingly free from preten- 
sion ; the winds that have twisted the trees into 
Rackham-like grotesques have blown away 
falsity and formality. 

Scituate life has always been along the shore. 
It is from the shore that coot-shooting used to 



112 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

furnish a livelihood to many a Scituate man, 
and still lures the huntsmen in the fine fall 
weather. It is the peculiar formation of the 
shore which has developed a small, clinker- 
built boat, and made the town famous for day 
fishing. It is along the shore that the unique 
and picturesque mossing industry is still car- 
ried on, and along the shore that the well- 
known colony of literary folk have settled. 

Scituate's history is really a fishing history, 
for as early as 1633 a fishing station was estab- 
lished here, and in course of time the North 
River, winding twenty miles through green 
meadows to the sea, was once the scene of 
more shipbuilding than any other river in 
New England. 

There is nothing more indicative of the 
Yankees' shrewd practicality than the early 
settlers' instant appreciation of the financial 
and economic potentialities of the fishing-trade. 
The Spaniard sought for gold in the new coun- 
try, or contented himself with the fluctuating 
fur trade with its demoralizing slack seasons. 
But the New Englander promptly applied 



THE SCITUATE SHORE 113 

himself to the mundane pursuit of cod and 
mackerel. Everybody fished. As John Smith, 
in his "Description of New England," says: 
"Young boyes and girles, salvages or any 
other, be they never such idlers, may turne, 
carry, and returne fish without shame or either 
great pain: he is very idle that is past twelve 
years of age and cannot doe so much : and shee 
is very old that cannot spin a thread to catch 
them." 

It began when Squanto the Indian showed 
the amazed colonists how he could tread the 
eels out of the mud with his feet and catch 
them with his hands. This was convenient, to 
be sure, but the colonists did not long content 
themselves with such primitive methods. They 
sent to England for cod hooks and lines ; mack- 
erel hooks and lines; herring nets and seines; 
shark hooks, bass nets, squid lines, and eel pots; 
and in a short time they had established a trade 
which meant more money than the gold mines 
of Guiana or Potosi. The modern financier 
who makes a fortune from the invention of a 
collar button or the sale of countless penny 



114 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

packages of gum is the lineal descendant of 
that first thrifty New Englander who did not 
scorn the humble cod because it was cheap 
and plentiful (you remember how these same 
cod "pestered" the ships of Gosnold in 1602), 
but set to work with the quiet initiative which 
has distinguished New Englanders ever since, 
first to catch, then to barter, and finally to sell 
his wares to all the world. For cheap as all fish 
was — twopence for a twelve-pound cod, sal- 
mon less than a penny a pound, and shad, 
when it was finally considered fit to eat at all, 
at two fish for a penny — yet, when all the 
world is ready to buy and the supply is inex- 
haustible, tremendous profits are possible. The 
many fast days of the Roman Catholic Church 
abroad opened an immense demand, and in a 
short time quantities of various kinds of fish 
(Josselyn in 1672 enumerates over two hun- 
dred caught in New England waters) were 
dried and salted and sent to England. 

This constant and steadily increasing trade 
radically affected the whole economic structure 
and history of New England for two centuries. 



THE SCITUATE SHORE 115 

Ships and all the shipyard industries; the farm, 
on which fish was used not only as a medium 
of exchange, but also as a valuable fertilizer; 
the home, where the many operations of curing 
and salting were carried on — all of those were 
developed directly by the growth of this par- 
ticular trade. Laws were made and continually 
revised regarding the fisheries and safeguard- 
ing their rights In every conceivable fashion; 
ship carpenters were exempt from military 
service, and many special exemptions were ex- 
tended to fishermen under the general statutes. 
The oyster Is now a dish for the epicure and 
the lobster for the millionaire. But In the old 
days when oysters a foot long were not un- 
common, and lobsters sometimes grew to six 
feet, every one had all he wanted, and some- 
times more than he wanted, of these delicacies. 
The stranger In New England may notice how 
certain customs still prevail, such as the Fri- 
day night fish dinner and the Sunday morning 
fish-cakes; and also that New Englanders as a 
whole have a rather fastidious taste in regard 
to the preparation of both salt- and fresh- 



116 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

water products. The food of any region is 
characteristic of that region, and to travel 
along the Old Coast Road and not partake of 
one of the delicious fish dinners, is as absurd 
as it would be to omit rice from a menu in 
China or roast beef from an English dinner. 

While the fishing trade was highly impor- 
tant in all the South Shore towns, yet it was 
especially so in Scituate. In 1770 more than 
thirty vessels, principally for mackerel, were 
fitted out in this one village, and these vessels 
not infrequently took a thousand barrels in a 
season. In winter they were used for Southern 
coasting, carrying lumber and fish and return- 
ing with grain and flour. The reason why fish- 
ing was so persistently and exclusively fol- 
lowed in this particular spot is not hard to 
seek. The sea yielded a far more profitable and 
ready crop than the land, and, besides, had 
a jealous way of nibbling away at the land 
wherever it could. It is estimated that it wastes 
away from twelve to fourteen inches of Fourth 
Cliff every year. 

But in spite of the sea's readily accessible 



THE SCITUATE SHORE 117 

crop it was natural that the "men of Kent" 
who settled the town should demand some 
portion of dry land as well. These men of Kent 
were not mermen, able to live in and on the 
water indefinitely, but decidedly gallant fel- 
lows, rather more courtly than their neighbors, 
and more polished than the race which suc- 
ceeded them. Gilson, Vassal, Hatherly, Cud- 
worth, Tilden, Hoar, Foster, Stedman, and 
Hinckley had all been accustomed to the 
elegancies of life in England as their names 
testify. The first land they used was on the 
cliffs, for it had already been improved by 
Indian planting; then the salt marshes, cov- 
ered with a natural crop of grass, and then the 
mellow intervales near the river. When the 
sea was forced to the regretful realization that 
she could not monopolize the entire attention 
of her fellows, she was persuaded to yield up 
some very excellent fertilizer in the way of 
seaweed. But she still nags away at the cliffs 
and shore, and proclaims with every flaunting 
wave and ripple that it is the water, not the 
land, which makes Scituate what it is. 



118 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

And, after all, the sea is right. It is along the 
shore that one sees Scituate most truly. Here 
the characteristic industry of mossing is still 
carried on in primitive fashion. The mossers 
work from dories, gathering with long-handled 
rakes the seaweed from the rocks and ledges 
along the shore. They bring it in, a heavy, 
dark, inert mass, all sleek and dripping, and 
spread it out to dry in the sun. As it lies there, 
neatly arranged on beds of smoothest pebbles, 
the sun bleaches it. One can easily differentiate 
the different days' haul, for the moss which is 
just spread out is almost black and that of yes- 
terday is a dark purple. It shimmers from 
purple into lavender; the lavender into some- 
thing like rose; and by thie time of the final 
washing and bleaching it lies in fine light white 
crinkles, almost like wool. It is a pretty sight, 
and the neatness and dispatch of the mossers 
make the odd sea-flower gardens attractive 
patches on the beach. Sometimes a family 
working together will make as much as a 
thousand dollars in a season gathering and 
preparing the moss. One wonders if all the 



THE SCITUATE SHORE 119 

people in the world could eat enough blanc- 
mange to consume this salty product, and is 
relieved to be reminded that the moss is also 
used for brewing and dyeing. 

It is really a pity to see Scituate only from 
a motor. There is real atmosphere to the place, 
which is worth breathing, but it takes more 
time to breathe in an atmosphere than merely 
to "take the air." Should you decide to ramble 
about the ancient town you will surely find 
your way to Scituate Point. The old stone 
lighthouse, over a century old, is no longer 
used, and the oil lantern, hung nightly out at 
the end of the romantic promontory, seems a 
return to days of long ago. You will also see 
the place where, in the stirring Revolutionary 
days, little Abigail and Rebecca Bates, with 
fife and drum marched up and down, close to 
the shore and yet hidden from sight, playing 
so furiously that their "martial music and 
other noises" scared away the enemy and 
saved the town from invasion. You will go 
to Second Cliif where are the summer homes 
of many literary people, and you will pass 



120 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

through Egj^t, catching what ghmpse you 
can of the stables and offices, paddocks and 
cottages of the immense estate of Dream wold. 
And of course you will have pointed out to 
you the birthplace of Samuel Woodworth, 
whose sole claim to remembrance is his poem 
of the "Old Oaken Bucket." The well-sweep 
is still where he saw it, when, as editor of the 
New York Mirror, it suddenly flashed before 
his reminiscent vision, but the old oaken 
bucket itself has been removed to a museum. 
After you have done all these things, you 
will, if you are wise, forsake Scituate Harbor, 
which is the old section, and Scituate Beach, 
which is the newer, summer section, and find 
the way to the burial ground, which, after the 
one in Plymouth, is the oldest in the State. 
Possibly there will be others at the burial 
ground, for ancestor worshipers are not con- 
fined to China, and every year there springs 
up a new crop of genealogists to kneel before 
the moss-grown headstones and, with truly 
admirable patience, decipher names and dates, 
half obliterated by the finger of time. One 



THE SCITUATE SHORE 121 

does not wonder that their descendants are so 
eager to trace their connection back to those 
men of Kent, whose sturdy title rings so 
bravely down the centuries. To be sure, what 
is left to trace is very slight in most cases, and 
quite without any savor of personality. Too 
often it is merely brief and dry recital of dates 
and number of progeny, and names of the 
same. Few have left anything so quaint as the 
words of Walter Briggs, who settled there in 
1651 and from whom Briggs Harbor was 
named. His will contains this thoughtful pro- 
vision: "For my wife Francis, one third of my 
estate during her life, also a gentle horse or 
mare, and Jemmy the negur shall catch it for 
her." 

The good people who came later (1634) from 
Plymouth and Boston and took up their diffi- 
cult colonial life under the pastorate of Mr. 
Lathrop, seem to have done their best to make 
"Satuit" (as it was first called, from the In- 
dians, meaning "cold brook") conform as 
nearly as possible to the other pioneer settle- 
ments, even to the point of discovering witches 



122 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

here. But religion and fasting were not able to 
accomplish what the ubiquitous summer in- 
flux has, happily, also failed to effect. Scituate 
remains different. 

Perhaps it was those men of Kent who gave 
it its indestructibly romantic bias; perhaps 
it is the jealousy of the ever-encroaching sea. 
The gray geese flying over the iridescent moss 
gleaming upon the pebbled beaches, the soli- 
tary lantern on the point are all parts of that 
differentness. And those who love her best are 
glad that it is so. 





CHAPTER VIII 

MARSHFIELD, THE HOME OF DANIEL WEBSTER 

Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free! 
Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea! 
Tolerant plains, that suffer the sea and the rains and the sun. 
Ye spread and span like the catholic man who hath mightily won 
God out of knowledge, and good out of infinite pain. 
And sight out of blindness, and purity out of a gtain. 

IT was these mighty marshes — this ample 
sweep of grass, of sea and sky — this vast 
earthly and heavenly spaciousness that must 
forever stand to all New Englanders as a back- 
ground to the powerful personality who chose 
it as his own home. Daniel Webster, when his 
eyes first turned to this infinite reach of large- 
ness, instinctively knew it as the place where 
his splendid senses would find satisfaction, and 
his splendid mind would soar into an even 
loftier freedom. Webster loved Marshfield 



124 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

with an intensity that made it pecuharly his 
own. Lanier, in language more intricate and 
tropical, exclaimed of his "dim sweet" woods: 
"Ye held me fast in your heart, and I held 
you fast in mine." Webster wielded the vital 
union between his nature and that of the land 
not only by profound sentiment, but by a 
vigorous physical grappling with the soil. 

Is it that vivid natures unconsciously seek 
an environment characteristic of them.^^ Or are 
they, perhaps, inevitably forced to create such 
an environment wherever they find them- 
selves? Both facts seem true in this case. This 
wide world of marsh and sea is not only beau- 
tifully expressive of one who plunged himself 
into a rich communion with the earth, with 
her full harvests and blooded cattle, with her 
fruitful brooks and lakes; but it is still, after 
more than half a century, vibrant with the 
spirit of the man who dwelt there. 

We of another generation — and a gener- 
ation before whom so many portentous events 
and figures have passed — find it hard to real- 
ize the tremendous magnetism and brilliancy 



MARSHFIELD 125 

of a man who has been so long dead, or properly 
to estimate the high historical significance of 
such a life. The human attribute which is the 
most immediately impelling in direct inter- 
course — personality — is the most elusive to 
preserve. If Webster's claim to remembrance 
rested solely upon that attribute, he would 
still be worthy of enduring fame. But his gifts 
flowered at a spectacular climax of national 
affairs and won thereby spectacular promi- 
nence. That these gifts were to lose something 
of their pristine repute before the end infuses, 
from a dramatic point of view, a contrasted 
and heightened luster to the period of their 
highest glory. 

Let us, casual travelers of a later and more 
careless day, walk now together over the place 
which is the indestructible memorial of a great 
man, and putting aside the measuring-stick of 
criticism — the sign of small natures — try to 
live for an hour in the atmosphere which was 
the breath of life to one who, if he failed greatly, 
also succeeded greatly, and whose noble 
achievement it was not only to express, but 



126 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

to vivify a love for the Union which, in its hour 
of supreme trial, became its triumphant force. 
Could we go back — not quite a hundred 
years — a little off the direct route to Ply- 
mouth, on a site overlooking the broad 
marshes of Green Harbor and the sea, where 
there now stands a boulder erected in 1914 by 
the Boston University Law School Associa- 
tion, we would find a comfortable, rambling 
house, distinguished among its New England 
neighbors by an easy and delightful hospitality 
— the kind of hospitality we call "Southern." 
There are many people in the house, on the 
veranda and lawns: a hostess of gentle mien 
and manners; children attractive in the spon- 
taneity of those who continually and happily 
associate with their elders; several house guests 
(yonder is Audubon the great naturalist, here 
is an ofiice-seeker from Boston, and that chap 
over there, so very much at home, can be no 
other than Peter Harvey, Webster's fond bi- 
ographer). Callers there are, also, as is shown 
by the line of chaises and saddle horses waiting 
outside, and old Captain Thomas and his wife. 



MARSHFTELD 127 

from whom the place was bought, and who 
still retain their original quarters, move in and 
out like people who consider themselves part 
of the family. It is a heterogeneous collection, 
yet by no means an awkward one, and every 
one is chatting with every one else with great 
amiability. It is late afternoon: the master of 
the house has been away all day, and now his 
guests and his family are glancing in the direc- 
tion from which he may be expected. For al- 
though every one is comfortable and properly 
entertained, yet the absence of the host creates 
an inexpressible emptiness; it is as if every- 
thing were quiescent — hardly breathing — 
merely waiting until he comes. Suddenly the 
atmosphere changes; it is charged with a 
strong vibrant quality; everything — all eyes, 
all interest — is instantly focused on the figure 
which has appeared among them. He is in 
fisherman's clothes — this newcomer — at- 
tired with a brave eye for the picturesque, in 
soft hat and flowing tie; but there are no fish- 
erman's clothes, no, nor any other cloakings 
which can conceal the resilient dignity of his 



128 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

bearing, his impressive build, and magnificent, 
kingly head. Sydney Smith called Webster a 
cathedral; and surely there must have been 
something in those enormous, burning eyes, 
that craglike brow, that smote even the most 
superficial observer into an admiration which 
was almost awe. 

Many men — perhaps even the majority — 
whatever their genius in the outer world, in 
their own houses are either relegated to — or 
choose — the inconspicuous role of mere mas- 
culine appendages. But here we have a man 
who is superbly the host: he knows and wel- 
comes every guest and caller; he personally 
supervises the disposal of their baggage and 
the selection of their chambers ; he himself has 
ordered the dinner — mutton which he has 
raised, fish which he has caught — and it is 
being cooked by Monica, the Southern slave 
whose freedom he purchased for her. He 
carves at table, priding himself on his dispatch 
and nicety, and keeps an eye on the needs of 
every one at the long board. Everything, 
every one in the house is irresistibly drawn 



MARSHFIELD 129 

about this magnetic center which dominates 
by its innate power of personahty more than 
by any dehberate intention. His children 
worship him; his wife idoHzes him; each man 
and woman on the place regards him with 
admiring affection. And in such congenial at- 
mosphere he expands, is genial, kindly, de- 
lightful. But devoted as he is to his home, his 
family, and his friends, and charming as he 
shows himself with them, yet it is not until we 
see him striding over the farm which he has 
bought that we see the Daniel Webster who 
is destined to live most graphically in the 
memories of those who like to think of great 
men in those intimate moments which are 
most personally characteristic of them. 

We must rise early in the morning if we 
would accompany him on his day's round. He 
himself is up at sunrise, for the sunrise is to 
him signal to new life. As he once wrote: 
"Among all our good people not one in a 
thousand sees the sun rise once a year. They 
know nothing of the morning. Their idea of it 
is that part of the day which comes along 



130 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

after a cup of coffee and a beefsteak or a piece 
of toast. With them morning is not a new 
issuing of Ught, a new bursting forth of the 
sun, a new waking up of all that has life from 
a sort of temporary death, to behold again the 
works of God, the heavens and the earth. . . . 
The first faint streak of light, the earliest 
purpling of the east which the lark springs up 
to greet, and the deeper and deeper coloring 
into orange and red, till at length the ' glorious 
sun is seen, regent of the day ' — this they 
never enjoy, for they never see it." 

So four o'clock finds Webster up and dressed 
and bound for the little study in his garden 
(the only building spared by the fire which 
destroyed the house in 1878) and beginning 
his correspondence. If he has no secretary he 
writes himself, and by time breakfast is an- 
nounced twenty letters, all franked and sealed, 
are ready to be posted. 

"Now," he says, smiling benignantly down 
the long breakfast table of family and friends, 
"my day's work is done — I have nothing to 
do but fish." 



MARSHFIELD 131 

Although this is, indeed, his favorite sport, 
and there is hardly a brook or lake or pond 
within a radius of twenty miles which does not 
bear the charmed legend of having been one 
of his favorite fishing grounds, he does not 
spend his days in amusement, like the typical 
country gentleman. Farming to him, the son 
of a yeoman, is no mere possession of a fine 
estate, but the actual participation in plough- 
ing, planting, and haying. His full animal 
spirits find relief in such labor. We cannot 
think of any similar example of such prodigious 
mental and physical energy. Macaulay was a 
great parliamentary orator, but he was the 
most conventional of city men; Burke and 
Chatham had no strength for such strenuous- 
ness after their professional toil. But Webster 
loved to know and to put his hand to every 
detail of farming and stock-raising. When he 
first came to Marshfield the soil was thin and 
sandy. It was he who instituted scientific farm- 
ing in the region, teaching the natives how to 
fertilize with kelp which was easily obtainable 
from the sea, and also with the plentiful small 



132 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

herring or menhaden. He taught them the 
proper care of the soil, and the rotation of 
crops. This passionate love of the earth was an 
integral part of the man. As the force of his 
mind drew its power, not from mere rhetorical 
facility, but from fundamental principles, so 
his magnificent body, like that of the fabled 
Antseus, seemed to draw perennial potency 
from contact with the earth. To acquire land 
— he owned nearly eighteen hundred acres at 
the time of his death — and to cultivate it to 
the highest possible degree of productiveness 
was his intense delight. The farm which he 
purchased from Captain Thomas grew to an 
estate of two or three dozen buildings, out- 
houses, tenant houses, a dairyman's cottage, 
fisherman's house, agricultural offices, and 
several large barns. We can imagine that he 
shows us all of these things — explaining every 
detail with enthusiasm and accuracy, occa- 
sionally digressing upon the habits of birds 
or fish, the influence of tides and currents, 
the changes of sky and wind. All natural laws 
are fascinating to him — inspiring his imagi- 



MARSHFIELD 133 

nation and uplifting his spirit — and it is these 
things, never pohtics or business, which he 
discusses in his hours of freedom. He himself 
supervises the planting and harvesting and 
slaughtering here and on his other farm at 
Franklin — the family homestead — even when 
obliged to be absent, or even when tempo- 
rarily residing in Washington and hard pressed 
with the cares of his office as Secretary of 
State. 

Those painters who include a parrot in the 
portrait of some fine frivolous lady do so to 
heighten their interpretation of character. We 
all betray our natures, by the creatures we in- 
stinctively gather about us. One might know 
that Jefferson at Monticello would select high- 
bred saddle horses as his companions; that 
Cardinal Richelieu would find no pet so sooth- 
ing, so alluring, as a soft-stepping cat; that 
Charles I would select the long-haired spaniel. 
So it is entirely in the picture that of all the 
beasts brought under human yoke, that great 
oxen, slow, solemn, strong, would appeal to 
the man whose searching eyes were never at 



134 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

rest except when they swept a wide horizon; 
whose mind found its deepest satisfaction in 
noble languages, the giant monuments of lit- 
erature and art, and whose soul best stretched 
its wings beside the limitless sea and under the 
limitless sky. Webster was fond of all animal 
life; he felt himself part of its free movement. 
Guinea hens, peacocks, ducks, flocks of tamed 
wild geese, dogs, horses — these were all part 
of the Marshfield place, but there was within 
the breast of the owner a special responsive- 
ness to great herds of cattle, and especially 
fine oxen, the embodiment of massive power. 
So fond was he of these favorite beasts of his, 
that often on his arrival home he would fling 
his bag into the hall without even entering the 
house, and hasten to the barn to see that they 
were properly tied up for the night. As he 
once said to his little son, as they both stood 
by the stalls and he was feeding the oxen with 
ears of corn from an unhusked pile lying on the 
barn floor: "I would rather be here than in the 
Senate," adding, with his famous smile, "I 
think it is better company." So we may be 



MARSHFIELD 135 

sure as we walk in our retrospect about the 
farm with him — he never speaks of it as an 
"estate " but always as a farm — he will linger 
longest where the Devon oxen, the Alderneys, 
Herefordshire, and Ayrshire are grazing, and 
that the eyes which Carlyle likened to anthra- 
cite furnaces will glow and soften. Twenty 
years from now he will gaze out upon his oxen 
once again from the window before which he 
has asked to be carried, as he lies waiting for 
death. Weariness, disease, and disappointment 
have weakened the elasticity of his spirit, and 
as they pass — his beloved oxen, slowly, sol- 
emnly — what procession of the years passes 
with them! Years of full living, of generous 
living; of deep emotions; of glory; years of 
ambition; of bereavement; of grief. It is all to 
pass — these happy days at Marshfield; the 
wife he so fondly cared for; the children he so 
deeply cherished. Sycophants are to fill, in a 
measure, the place of friends, the money which 
now flows in so freely is to entangle and en- 
snare him; the lofty aspiration which now 
inspires him is to degenerate into a presiden- 



136 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

tial ambition which will eat into his soul. But 
to-day let us, as long as we may, see him as 
he is in the height of his powers. Let us walk 
with him under the trees which he planted. 
Those large elms, gracefully silhouetted against 
the house, were placed there with his own 
hands at the birth of his son Edward and his 
daughter Julia, and he always refers to them 
gently as "brother" and "sister." To plant a 
tree to mark an event was one of his pictur- 
esque customs — an unconscious desire, per- 
haps, to project himself into the future. I am 
quite sure, as we accompany him, he will ex- 
patiate on the improvement in the soil which 
he has effected ; that he will point out eagerly 
not only the domestic but the wild animals 
about the place; and that he will stand for a 
few moments on the high bluff overlooking the 
sea and the marshes and let the wind blow 
through his dark hair. He is carefully dressed 
— he always dresses to fit the occasion — and 
to-day, as he stands in his long boots reaching 
to the knee and adorned with a tassel, his bell- 
crowned beaver hat in his hand, and in his 



MARSHFIELD 137 

tight pantaloons and well-cut coat — a mag- 
nificent specimen of virile manhood — the 
words of Lanier, although written at a later 
date, and about marshes far more lush than 
these New England ones, beat upon our ears: 

"Oh, what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea? 
Somehow my soul seems suddenly free 
From the weighing of fate and the sad discussion of sin, 
By the length and the breadth and the sweep of the 
marshes of Glynn." 

On the way back he will show us the place 
where three of his favorite horses are buried, 
for he does not sell the old horses who have 
done him good service, but has them buried 
"with the honors of war" — that is, standing 
upright, with their halters and shoes on. Above 
one of them he has placed the epitaph : 

"Siste Viator! 
Viator te major hie sistit." 

I do not know if, as we return to the house 
where already a fresh group of visitors has ar- 
rived, he will pause by a corner of the yard set 
off by an iron fence. He has chosen this spot as 
the place where he shall lie, and here, in time. 



138 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

are to repose under the wide and simple vault 
of sky the wife and children whose going before 
is to bring such desolation. It is a place su- 
premely fitting for that ample spirit which 
knew for its own the nobility of large spaces, 
and the grandeur of repose. 

The life of Daniel Webster is one of the most 
dramatic and touching of any of our great 
men. He was an orator of such solid thought 
and chaste eloquence that even now, without 
the advantage of the marvelously rich and 
flexible voice and the commanding presence 
that made each word burn like a fire, even 
without this incalculable personal interpreta- 
tion, his speeches remain as a permanent part 
of our literature, and will so long as English 
oratory is read. He was a brilliant lawyer — 
the foremost of his day — and his statesman- 
ship was of equal rank. In private life he was 
a peculiarly devoted and tender son, husband, 
father, and friend. That he should have be- 
come saddened by domestic losses and some- 
what vitiated bj^ flattery were, perhaps, inevi- 
table. He was bitterly condemned — more 



MARSHFIELD 139 

bitterly by his contemporaries than by those 
who now study his words and work — for 
lowering his high standard in regard to slav- 
ery. It is impossible to refute the accusation, 
at the end of his life, of a carelessness ap- 
proaching unscrupulousness in money matters. 
His personal failings, which were those of a 
man of exceptional vitality, have been heav- 
ily — too heavily — emphasized. He ate and 
drank and spent money lavishly; he had a fine 
library; he loved handsome plate and good 
service and good living. He was generous; he 
was kind. That he was susceptible to adula- 
tion and, after the death of his first wife, 
drifted into associations less admirable than 
those of his earlier years, are the dark threads 
of a woof underrunning a majestic warp. He 
adored his country with a fervor that savors 
of the heroic, and when he said, "There are no 
Alleghanies in my politics," he spoke the 
truth. The intense passion for the soil which 
animated him at Marshfield was only a frag- 
ment of that higher passion for his country — 
a feeling never tainted by sectionalism or local 



140 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

prejudice. It was this profound love for the 
Union, coupled with his surpassing gift of elo- 
quence in expressing that love and inspiring it 
in all who heard him, that distinguishes him 
for all time. 

There are other memorable things about 
Marshfield. Governor Edward Winslow, who 
was sent to England to represent the Ply- 
mouth and Massachusetts Bay Colonies, and 
whose son Josiah was the first native Governor 
of the Colony, may both be called Marshfield 
men. Peregrine White, the first white child born 
in this country, lies in the Winslow Burying 
Ground. One of the most singular changes 
on our coast occurred in this vicinity when in 
one night the "Portland Breeze" closed up 
the mouth of the South River and four miles 
up the beach opened up the mouth of the 
North River, making an entrance three quar- 
ters of a mile wide between Third and Fourth 
Cliff. 

These and many other men and events of 
Marshfield are properly given a place in the 
history of New England, but the special glory 



MARSHFIELD 141 

of this spot will always be that Daniel Web- 
ster chose to live, chose to die, and chose 
to be buried under the vast vault of her 
skyey spaces, within the sound of her eternal 
sea. 











CHAPTER IX 

DUXBURY HOMES 

THERE are certain places whose happy 
fortune seems to be that they are always 
specially loved and specially sought by the 
children of men. From that memorable date 
in 1630 when a little group of the Plymouth 
colonists asked permission to locate across the 
bay at "Duxberie" until now, when the sum- 
mer colony alone has far surpassed that of the 
original settlers, this section of the coast — 
with its lovely six-mile beach, its high bluffs, 
and its pleasant hills and pasture lands, upon 
which are found quite a southern flora, unique 
in this northern latitude — has been thor- 
oughly frequented and enjoyed. 



DUXBURY HOMES 143 

There is no more graphic index to the caH- 
ber of a people than the houses which they 
build, and the first house above all others 
which we must associate with this spot is the 
Standish cottage, built at the foot of Cap- 
tain's Hill by Alexander Standish, the son of 
Myles, partly from materials from his father's 
house, which was burned down, but whose 
cellar is still visible. This long, low, gambrel- 
roofed structure, with a broad chimney show- 
ing the date of 1666, was a long way ahead of 
the first log cabins erected by the Pilgrims — ■ 
farther than most of us realize, accustomed as 
we are to glass instead of oiled paper in win- 
dows; to shingles, and not thatch for roofs. It 
is fitting that this ancient and charming dwell- 
ing should be associated with one of the most 
romantic, most striking, names in the Ply- 
mouth Colony. There are few more picturesque 
personalities in our early history than Myles 
Standish. Small in stature, fiery in spirit, a 
terror to the Indians, and a strong arm to the 
Pilgrims, there is no doubt that his determina- 
tion to live in Duxbury — which he named for 



144 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

Duxboroiigh Hall, his ancestral home in Lan- 
cashire — went far in obtaining for it a sepa- 
rate incorporation and a separate church. This 
was the first definite offshoot from the Ply- 
mouth Colony, and was accompanied by the 
usual maternal fears. While he could not for- 
bid them going to Duxbury to settle, yet, 
when they asked for a separate incorporation 
and church, Bradford granted it most unwill- 
ingly. He voiced the general sentiment when 
he wrote that such a separation presaged the 
ruin of the church "& will provoke y^ Lord's 
displeasure against them." 

However, such unkind predictions in no 
wise bothered the sturdy little group who 
moved over to the new location, needing room 
for their cattle and their gardens, and most of 
all a sense of freedom from the restrictions of 
the mother colony. The son of Elder Brewster 
went, and in time the Elder himself, and so 
did John Alden and his wife Priscilla, whose 
courtship has been so well told by Longfellow 
that it needs no further embellishing here. On 
the grassy knoll where John and Priscilla 



DUXBURY HOMES 145 

built their home in 1631, their grandson built 
the cottage which now stands — the property 
of the Alden Kindred Association. John Alden 
seems to have been an attractive young fellow 
— it is easy to see why Priscilla Mullins pre- 
ferred him to the swart, truculent widower — 
but from our point of view John Alden's chief 
claim to fame is that he was a friend of Myles 
Standish. 

Let us, as we pay our respects to Duxbury, 
pause for a moment and recall some of the 
courageous adventures, some of the brave 
traits and some of the tender ones, which 
make up our memory of this doughty military 
commander. In the first place, we must re- 
member that he was never a member of the 
church of the Pilgrims : there is even a question 
if he were not — like the rest of his family 
in Lancashire — a Roman Catholic ; and this 
immediately places him in a position of pe- 
culiar distinction. From the first his mission 
was not along ecclesiastical lines, but along 
military and civil ones. The early histories are 
full of his intrepid deeds: there was never an 



146 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

expedition too dangerous or too difficult to 
daunt him. He would attack with the utmost 
daring the hardest or the humblest task. He 
was absolutely loyal to the interest of the Col- 
ony, and during that first dreadful winter 
when he was among the very few who were not 
stricken with sickness, he tended the others 
day and night, "unceasing in his loving care." 
As in many audacious characters this sweeter 
side of his nature does not seem to have been 
fully appreciated by his contemporaries, and 
we have the letter in which Robinson, that 
"most learned, polished and modest spirit," 
writes to Bradford, and warns him to have 
care about Standish. He loves him right well, 
and is persuaded that God has given him to 
them in mercy and for much good, if he is used 
aright; but he fears that there may be wanting 
in him "that tenderness of the life of man 
(made after God's image) which is meet." 
This warning doubtless flattered Standish, but 
Robinson's later criticism of his methods at 
Weymouth hurt the little captain cruelly. He 
seems to have cherished an intense affection for 



DUXBURY HOMES 147 

the Leyden pastor, such as valorous natures 
often feel for meditative ones, and that Robin- 
son died before he — Standish — could justify 
himself was a deep grief to the soldier to whom 
mere physical hardships were as nothing. We 
do not know a great deal about this relation- 
ship between the two men : in this as in so many 
cases the intimate stories of these men and 
women, "also their love, and their hatred, and 
their envy is now perished." But we do know 
that thirty years later when the gallant cap- 
tain lay dying he wrote in his will : " I give three 
pounds to Mercy Robinson, whom I tenderly 
love for her grandfather's sake." Surely one 
feels the touching eloquence of this brief sen- 
tence the fitting close of a life not only heroic 
in action, but deeply sensitive in sentiment. 

He died on his farm in Duxbury in 1656 
when he was seventy-three, and the Myles 
Standish Monument on Captain's Hill, three 
hundred and ten feet above the bay, is no 
more conspicuous than his knightly and ten- 
der life among the people he elected to serve. 
His two wives, and also Priscilla and John 



148 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

Alden, for whom he entertained such hvely 
love and equally lively fury, all are buried 
here — the Captain's last home fittingly 
marked by four cannon and a sturdy boulder. 

Not only for Standish and Alden is Dux- 
bury famous. The beloved William Brewster 
himself moved to this new settlement, and up 
to a few years ago the traces of the whitewood 
trees which gave the name of "Eagle's Nest" 
to his house could be distinguished. One son — 
Love — lived w ith the venerable elder, who 
was a widower, and his other son Jonathan 
owned the neighboring farm. In the sight of 
the Plymouth Colony — their first home in 
the new land — the three men often worked 
together, cutting trees and planting. 

Others of the original Mayflower company 
came too, leaving traces of themselves in such 
names as Blackfriars Brook, Billingsgate, and 
Houndsditch — names which they brought 
from Old England. 

The homes which these pioneers so labori- 
ously and so lovingly wrought — what were 
they? How did they compare with the modern 



DUXBURY HOMES 149 

home and household? In Mr. Sheldon's "His- 
tory of Deerfield " we find such a charming and 
vivid picture of home life in the early days — 
and one that applies with equal accuracy to 
Duxbury — that we cannot do better than 
copy it here: 

"The ample kitchen was the center of the 
family life, social and industrial. Here around 
the rough table, seated on rude stools or 
benches, all partook of the plain and some- 
times stinted fare. A glance at the family gath- 
ered here after nightfall on a winter's day may 
prove of interest. 

"After a supper of bean porridge or hasty 
pudding and milk of which all partake in com- 
mon from a great pewter basin, or wooden 
bowl, with spoons of wood, horn or pewter; 
after a reverent reading of the Bible, and fer- 
vent supplications to the Most High for 
prayer and guidance; after the watch was set 
on the tall mount, and the vigilant sentinel 
began pacing his lonely beat, the shutters 
were closed and barred, and with a sense of 
security the occupations of the long winter 



150 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

evening began. Here was a picture of industry 
enjoined alike by the law of the land and the 
stern necessities of the settlers. All were busy. 
Idleness was a crime. On the settle, or a low 
armchair, in the most sheltered nook, sat the 
revered grandam — as a term of endearment 
called granny — in red woolen gown, and 
white linen cap, her gray hair and wrinkled 
face reflecting the bright firelight, the long 
stocking growing under her busy needles, 
while she watched the youngling of the flock 
in the cradle by her side. The goodwife, in 
linsey-woolsey short-gown and red petticoat 
steps lightly back and forth in calf pumps be- 
side the great wheel, or poising gracefully on 
the right foot, the left hand extended with the 
roll or bat, while with a wheel finger in the 
other, she gives the wheel a few swift turns for 
a final twist to the long-drawn thread of wool 
or tow. The continuous buzz of the flax 
wheels, harmonizing with the spasmodic hum 
of the big wheel, shows that the girls are pre- 
paring a stock of linen against their wedding 
day. Less active and more fitful rattled the 



DUXBURY HOMES 151 

quill wheel, where the younger children are 
filling quills for the morrow's weaving. 

*' Craftsmen are still scarce, and the yeoman 
must depend largely on his own skill and re- 
sources. The grandsire, and the goodman, his 
son, in blue woolen frocks, buckskin breeches, 
long stockings, and clouted brogans with pew- 
ter buckles, and the older boys in shirts of 
brown tow, waistcoat and breeches of butter- 
nut-colored woolen homespun, surrounded by 
piles of white hickory shavings, are whit- 
tling out with keen Barlow jack-knives imple- 
ments for home use: ox-bows and bow-pins, 
axe-helves, rakestales, forkstales, handles for 
spades and billhooks, wooden shovels, flail 
staff and swingle, swingling knives, or pokes 
and hog yokes for unruly cattle and swine. 
The more ingenious, perhaps, are fashioning 
buckets or powdering tubs, or weaving skeps, 
baskets or snowshoes. Some, it may be, sit 
astride the wooden shovel, shelling corn on its 
iron-shod edge, while others are pounding it 
into samp or hominy in the great wooden 
mortar. 



152 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

"There are no lamps or candles, but the red 
light from the burning pine knots on the hearth 
glows over all, repeating, in fantastic panto- 
mime on the brown walls and closed shutters, 
the varied activities around it. These are oc- 
casionally brought into higher relief by the 
white flashes, as the boys throw handfuls of 
hickory shavings onto the forestick, or punch 
the back log with the long iron peel, while 
wishing they had as ' many shillings as sparks 
go up the chimney.' Then, the smoke-stained 
joists and boards of the ceiling with the 
twisted rings of pumpkin strings or crimson 
peppers and festoons of apple, drying on poles 
hung beneath; the men's hats, the crook- 
necked squashes, the skeins of thread and 
yarn hanging in bunches on the wainscot; the 
sheen of the pewter plates and basins, stand- 
ing in rows on the shelves of the dresser; the 
trusty firelock with powder horn, bandolier, 
and bullet pouch, hanging on the summertree, 
and the bright brass warming-pan behind 
the bedroom door — all stand revealed more 
clearly for an instant, showing the provident 



DUXBURY HOMES 153 

care for the comfort and safety of the house- 
hold. Dimly seen in the corners of the room 
are baskets in which are packed hands of flax 
from the barn, where, under the flaxbrake, the 
swingling knives and the coarse hackle, the 
shives and swingling tow have been removed 
by the men; to-morrow the more deft ma- 
nipulations of the women will prepare these 
bunches of fiber for the little wheel, and granny 
will card the tow into bats, to be spun into 
tow yarn on the big wheel. All quaff the spar- 
kling cider or foaming beer from the briskly 
circulating pewter mug, which the last out of 
bed in the morning must replenish from the 
barrel in the cellar." 

One notices the frequent reference to beer 
in these old chronicles. The tea, over which 
the colonists were to take such a dramatic 
stand in a hundred years, had not yet been in- 
troduced into England, and neither had coffee. 
Forks had not yet made their appearance. In 
this admirable picture Mr. Sheldon does not 
mention one of the evening industries which 



154 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

was peculiarly characteristic of the Plymouth 
Colony. This was the making of clapboards, 
which with sassafras and beaver skins, consti- 
tuted for many years the principal cargo sent 
back to England from the Colony. Another 
point — the size of the families. The mother 
of Governor William Phips had twenty-one 
sons and five daughters, and the Reverend 
John Sherman had six children by his first 
wife and twenty by his second. These were not 
uncommon figures in the early life of New 
England; and with so many numbers within 
itself the home life was a center for a very 
complete and variegated industrial life. Surely 
it is a long cry from these kitchen fireplaces — 
so large that often a horse had to be driven 
into the kitchen dragging the huge back log — 
these immense families, to the kitchenette and 
one-child family of to-day ! 

This, then, was the old Duxbury: the Dux- 
bury of long, cold winters, privations, and 
austerity. Down by the shore to-day is the 
new Duxbury — a Duxbury of automobiles, 
of business men's trains, of gay society at 



DUXBURY HOMES 155 

Powder Point, where in the winter is the well- 
known boys' school — a Duxbury of summer 
cottages, white and green along the shore, 
green and brown under the pines. Of these 
summer homes many are new: the Wright es- 
tate is one of the finest on the South Shore, and 
the pleasant, spacious dwelling distinguished 
by its handsome hedge of English privet 
formerly belonged to Fanny Davenport, the 
actress. Others are old houses, very tastefully, 
almost affectionately remodeled by those for 
whom the things of the past have a special 
lure. These remodeled cottages are, perhaps, 
the prettiest of all. Those very ancient land- 
marks, sagging into pathetic disrepair, present 
a sorrowful, albeit an artistic, silhouette 
against the sky. But these "new-old" cot- 
tages, with ruffled muslin curtains at the 
small-paned, antique windows, brave with a 
shining knocker on the green-painted front 
door, and gay with old-fashioned gardens to 
the side or in the rear — these are a delight to 
all, and an honor to both past and present. 
Surely the fair town of Duxbury, which so 



156 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

smilingly enticed the Pilgrims across the bay to 
enjoy her sunny beach and rolling pasture 
lands, must be happy to-day as she was then 
to feel her ground so deeply tilled, and still to 
be so daintily adorned with homes and gardens 
and with laughing life. 



'>3*^? 




















::kW^ 



CHAPTER X 

KINGSTON AND ITS MANUSCRIPTS 

ON a charming eminence at two cross- 
roads, delicately dappled by fine elm 
shade and clasped by an antique grapevine, 
rests the old Bradford house. From the main 
road half a mile away you will see only the 
slanting roof, half concealed by rolling pasture 
land, but if you will trouble to turn off from 
the main road, and if you will not be daunted 
by the unsavoriness of the immediate neigh- 
borhood, you will find it quite worth your 
while. The house presents only a casual side to 
the street — one fancies it does not take much 
interest in its upstart neighbors — but imagi- 
nation makes us believe that it regards with 
brooding tenderness the lovely tidal river 



158 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

which winds away through the marshes to the 
sea. Interesting as the house is for its archi- 
tectural features and for its dehghtful loca- 
tion — despite the nearness of the passing 
train — yet it is on neither of these points 
that its fame rests. 

In this house, built in 1674, and once be- 
longing to Major John Bradford, the grandson 
of the Governor, was preserved for many 
years one of the most valuable American 
manuscripts in existence, and one fated to the 
most romantic adventures in the annals of 
Lost and Found. 

Bradford's "History of the Plymouth Plan- 
tation" is our sole source of authentic informa- 
tion for the period 1606-46. It is the basis for 
all historical study of the early life of the Pil- 
grims in this country, and when we look at the 
quiet roof of the Bradford house to-day and 
realize how narrowly the papers — for they 
remained in manuscript form for two hundred 
years — escaped being lost forever, our minds 
travel again over the often told story. 

The manuscript, penned in Governor Brad- 



KINGSTON 159 

ford's fine old hand, in a folio with a parch- 
ment back, and with some childish scribblings 
by little Mercy Bradford on the cover, passed 
at the Governor's death to his son, and at his 
death to his son. It reposed in the old house at 
which we are now looking until 1728, doubt- 
less regarded as something valuable, but not 
in the least appreciated at its full and peculiar 
worth. When Major John Bradford lent it to 
the Reverend Thomas Prince to assist him in 
his "Chronological History of New England," 
he was merely doing what he had done many 
times before. In these days of burglar-proof 
safes and fire protection it makes us shiver to 
think of this priceless holograph passed from 
hand to hand in such a casual manner. But 
it seems to have escaped any mishap under 
Dr. Prince, who deposited it eventually in the 
library of the Old South Church. Here it re- 
mained for half a century, still in manuscript 
form and frequently referred to by scholars. 
Thomas Hutchinson used it in compiling his 
"History of Massachusetts Bay," and Mather 
used it also. At the time of the Revolution the 



160 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

Old South was looted, and this document 
(along with many others) disappeared abso- 
lutely. No trace whatever could be found of 
it: the most exhaustive search was in vain, and 
scholars and historians mourned for a loss that 
was irreparable. And then, after half a cen- 
tury, after the search had been entirely aban- 
doned, it was discovered, quite by chance, by 
one who fortunately knew its value, tucked 
into the Library of Fulham Palace in London. 
After due rejoicing on the American side and 
due deliberation on the English side of the 
water, it was very properly and very politely 
returned to this country in 1897. Now it rests 
after its career of infinite hazard, in a case in 
the Boston State House, elaborately protected 
from fire and theft, from any accidental or 
premeditated harm, and Kingston must con- 
tent itself with a copy in Pilgrim Hall at 
Plymouth. 

Kingston's history commences with a manu- 
script and continues in the same form. If you 
would know the legends, the traditions, the 
events which mark this ancient town, you will 



KINGSTON 161 

have to turn to records, diaries, memoranda, 
memorial addresses and sermons, many of 
them never pubhshed. 

It is rather odd that this serene old place, 
discovered only two or three days after the 
landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, is so 
devoid of a printed career. As soon as the 
Pilgi-ims had explored the spot, they put them- 
selves on record as having "a great liking to 
plant in it" instead of in Plymouth. But 
they decided against it because it lay too far 
from their fishing and was "so encompassed 
with woods," that they feared danger from 
the savages. It was very soon settled, however, 
and remained as the north end of Plymouth 
for a hundred and six years, until 1726. Gov- 
ernor Bradford writes, in regard to its colo- 
nization : 

" Y^ people of y^ plantation begane to grow 
in their outward estate . . . and as their 
stocks increased and y^ increase vendible, ther 
was no longer any holding them togeather, but 
now they must of necessitoe goe to their 
great lots: they could not otherwise keep 



162 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

catle; and having oxen grown they must have 
land for plowing and tillage. And no man now 
thought he could live except he had catle and 
a great deal of ground to keep them: all striv- 
ing to increase their stocks. By which means 
they were scattered all over y^ bay, quickly, 
and y® towne, in which they had lived com- 
pactly till now [1632] was left very thine, and 
in a short time almost desolate." 

Governor Bradford seems to deplore this 
moving out of Plymouth, but as a matter of 
fact he was among the first to go, and his 
estate on Jones River comprised such a goodly 
portion of what is now Kingston that when 
he died he was the richest man in the Colony ! 
A boulder marks the place which he, with that 
unerring eye for a fine view which distinguished 
the early settlers, chose for his estate. From 
here one catches a glimpse of water, open 
fields, trees, the Myles Standish Monument 
to the left, the sound of the passing automo- 
biles behind. The distant smokestacks would 
be unfamiliar to Governor Bradford's eye, but 
the fragrant Kingston air which permeates it 



KINGSTON 163 

all would greet him as sweetly to-day as it did 
three hundred years ago. 

Governor Bradford, who was Governor for 
thirty-seven years, was a man of remarkable 
erudition. Cotton Mather says of him: "The 
Dutch tongue was become almost as vernacu- 
lar to him as the English; the French tongue 
he could also manage ; the Latin and the Greek 
he had mastered; but the Hebrew he most of 
all studied." Therefore if the curious spelling 
of his history strikes us as unscholarly, we 
must remember that at that time there was 
no fixed standard for English orthography. 
Queen Elizabeth employed seven different 
spellings for the word "sovereign" and Leices- 
ter rendered his own name in eight different 
ways. It was by no means a mark of illiteracy 
to spell not only unlike your neighbor, but un- 
like yourself on the line previous. 

But it is more than quaint diction and fan- 
tastic spelling which fascinates us as we turn 
over, not only the leaves of Bradford's famous 
history, but the pile of fading records of vari- 
ous kinds of this once prosperous shipbuilding 



164 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

town. The records of Kingston are valuable, 
not only because they tell the tale of this par- 
ticular spot, but because they are delightfully 
typical of all the South Shore towns. The yel- 
lowing diaries mention crude offenses, crude 
chastisements; give scraps of genealogies as 
broken as the families themselves are now 
broken and scattered ; lament over one daugh- 
ter of the Puritans who took the veil in a 
Roman Catholic convent; sternly relate, in 
Rabelaisian frankness, dark sins, punished 
with mediaeval justice. In fact, these righteous 
early colonists seemed to find a genuine satis- 
faction in devising punishments, and in putting 
them into practice. We read that the stocks 
(also called "bilbaos" because they were for- 
merly manufactured in Bilbao, in Spain) were 
first occupied by the man who had made 
them, as the court decided that his charge for 
the work was excessive! There were wooden 
cages in which criminals were confined and 
exposed to public view; whipping-posts; cleft 
sticks for profane tongues. Drunkenness was 
punished by disfranchisement ; the blasphemer 



KINGSTON 165 

and the heretics were branded with a hot 
iron. 

Let us look at some of these old records, not 
all of them as ferocious as this, but interesting 
for the minutiae which they preserve and which 
makes it possible for us to reconstruct some- 
thing of that atmosphere of the past. It was 
ninety-six years after the settlement at Ply- 
mouth that Kingston made its first request for 
a separation. It was not granted for almost a 
decade, but from then on the ecclesiastical 
records furnish us with a great deal of in- 
timate and chatty material. For instance, we 
learn in 1719 that Isaac" Holmes was to have 
"20 shillings for sweeping, opening and shut- 
ting of the doors and casements of the meeting 
house for 1 year," which throws some light 
upon sextons' salaries! 

The minute directions as to the placing of 
the pews in the meeting-house (1720) contain 
a pungent element of personality. Major John 
Bradford is "next to the pulpit stairs"; Elisha 
Bradford on the left "as you go in"; Ben- 
jamin Eaton's place is "between minister's 



166 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

stairs and west door"; while Peter West is 
ingloriously, and for what reason we know not, 
relegated to the gallery " in the front, next to 
the stairs, behind the women." 

It is significant to note (1728) that seats 
are built at each end above the galleries for the 
Indians and negroes. 

Fish laws, rewards for killing wild cats, 
bickerings with the minister, and brief mention 
of the death of many women at an early age — 
after having given birth to an incredible num- 
ber of children — fill up pages and pages. 

The eye rests upon a resolution passed (1771) 
to " allow Benjamin Cook the sum of 8 shillings 
for a coffin, and liquor at the funeral of James 
Rowland." They might not believe in prayers 
for the dead in those days, but there was evi- 
dently no reason why the living should not 
receive some cheer! 

How is this for the minister's salary? The 
Reverend Doctor Willis (1780) is to receive 
eighty pounds a year, to be paid partly in 
Indian corn, rye, pork, and beef. Ten cords of 
wood yearly are allowed him "until he have 



KINGSTON 167 

a family, then twenty cords, are to be al- 
lowed, the said wood to be delivered at his 
door." 

Mr. Levi Bradford agrees to make the whip- 
ping-post and stocks for nine shillings, if the 
town will find the iron (1790). 

The wage paid for a day's labor on the high- 
way (1791) was as follows: For a day's labor 
by a man, 2 shillings, 8 pence; for a yoke of 
oxen, 2 shillings; for a horse, 1 shilling, 6 pence; 
for a cart, 1 shilling, 4 pence. One notes the 
prices are for an eight-hour day. 

However, the high cost of living began to 
make itself felt even then. How else account 
for the statement (1796) that Mr. Parris, the 
schoolmaster, has been allowed fifty shillings 
in addition to his salary "considering the in- 
crease in the price of provisions".'^ 

There seems to have been a great celebration 
on the occasion of raising the second meeting- 
house in Kingston (1798). One old account 
reads: "Booths were erected on the field oppo- 
site, and all kinds of liquor and refreshment 
were sold freely." After the frame was up a 



168 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

procession was formed of those who were 
employed in the raising, consisting of car- 
penters, sailors, blacksmiths, etc., each taking 
some implement of his trade such as axes, 
rules, squares, tackles and ropes. They walked 
to the Great Bridge and back to the tem- 
porary building that had been used for wor- 
ship (the Quail Trap) while the new one was 
being planned. Here they all had punch and 
an "hour or so of jollity." 

If the women's lives were conspicuously 
short, it was not so with the men. Ebenezer 
Cobb, who died in 1801 in the one hundred 
and eighth year of his age, had lived in no 
less than three centuries, having seen six years 
in the seventeenth, the whole of the eight- 
eenth, and a year of the nineteenth. 

The minister's tax is separated from the 
other town taxes in 1812 — thus even in this 
little village is reflected the great movement 
of separation of Church and State. In 1851 
when we read of a Unitarian church being 
built we realize that the Puritan regime is 
over in New England. 



KINGSTON 169 

Thus with the assistance of the Pelegs and 
Hezekiahs, the Zadocks, Ichabods, and Ze- 
nases — names which for some absurd and 
irreverent reason suggest a picture puzzle — 
we manage to piece together scraps of the 
Kingston of long ago. 

We must confess to some relief at the inevi- 
table conclusion that such study brings — 
namely, that the early settlers were not the 
unblemished prigs and paragons tradition has 
so fondly branded them. They seem to have 
been human enough — erring enough, if we 
take these records penned by themselves. 
However, for any such iconoclastic observa- 
tion it is reassuring to have the judgment of so 
careful a historian as Charles Francis Adams. 
He says: 

"That the earlier generations of Massachu- 
setts were either more law-abiding or more 
self-restrained than the later is a proposition 
which accords neither with tradition nor with 
the reason of things. The habits of those days 
were simpler than those of the present: they 
were also essentially grosser. ..." 



170 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

He then gives a dozen pages or so of hith- 
erto unpubhshed church records, gathered 
from as many typical Massachusetts towns, 
which throw an undeniable and unflattering 
light on the social habits of that early period. 
As explicit and public confession before the 
church congregation was enforced, these 
church records contain startlingly graphic 
statements of drunkenness, blasphemy, steal- 
ing, and immorality in all its various phases. 

There are countless church records which 
duplicate this one of the ordination of a Mas- 
sachusetts pastor in 1729: "6 Barrels and a 
half of Cyder, 28 gallons of wine, 2 gallons of 
Brandy, and 4 of rum, loaf sugar, lime juice 
and pipes," all, presumably, consumed at the 
time and on the spot of the ordination. Even 
the most pessimistic must admit that long be- 
fore our prohibition era we had traveled far 
beyond such practices. 

The immorality seems to have been the 
natural reaction from morbid spiritual excite- 
ment induced by religious revivals. Poor Gov- 
ernor Bradford never grasped this, and we find 



KINGSTON 171 

him lamenting (1642): "Marvilous it may be 
to see and consider how some kind of wicked- 
ness did grow and break forth here in a land 
where the same was much witnessed against, 
and so narrowly looked on and severely pun- 
ished when it was known." 

We hear the same plaint from Jonathan 
Edwards a century later. 

It is well to honor the Pilgrims for their 
many stanch and admirable qualities, but it is 
only fair to recall that the morbidity of their 
religion made them less healthy-minded than 
we, and that many of their practices, such as 
the well-recognized custom of "bundling," 
were indications of a people holding far lower 
moral standards than ours. 

The old sermons, diaries, biographies, and 
records lie on dusty shelves now, and few pause 
to read them, and in Kingston no one yet has 
gathered them into a local history. There are 
other records traced, not in sand, but on the 
soil that may also be read by any who pass. 
Some remnants of the trenches and terraces 
dug by the quota of Arcadian refugees who 



172 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

fell to Kingston's share after the pathetic 
flight from Nova Scotia may still be seen — 
claimed by some to be the first irrigation at- 
tempt in America. 

The old "Massachusetts Payth" which fol- 
lows the road more or less closely beyond 
Kingston is traced with difficulty and uncer- 
tainty in Kingston itself, but there is an- 
other highway as clear to-day as it was three 
hundred years ago. And this is the lovely 
tidal river, named after the master of the 
Mayflower, up which used to come and go not 
only many ships of commerce, but, in the 
evenings after life had become less austere, 
boatloads of merrymakers from Plymouth and 
Duxbury to attend the balls given at what was 
originally the King's Town. 

It has carried much traffic in its day, that 
river which now winds so gracefully down to 
the sea, and which we see so well from the 
yard of the old Bradford house. Down it 
floated the vessels made by Kingston men, and 
out of it was dug much bog iron for the use of 
Washington's artillery. 



KINGSTON 173 

Monk's Hill — which the old records call 
Mont's Hill Chase, a name supposed to have 
been applied to a hunt in England — could 
tell a story too, if one had ears to hear. The 
highest land in Kingston, during the Revolu- 
tion it was one of the points where a beacon 
fire was lighted to alarm the town in case of 
invasion by the enemy. 

Kingston is not without history, although 
its manuscripts lie long untouched upon li- 
brary shelves, and its historic soil is tramped 
over by unheeding feet. That the famous 
manuscript which was its greatest historical 
contribution has been taken away from it, is 
no loss in the truest sense of the word, for this 
monumental work, which belongs to no one 
place, but to the country as a whole, is prop- 
erly preserved at the State House. 

Kingston seems amenable to this arrange- 
ment, just as she seems entirely willing that 
Plymouth should claim the first century of her 
career. When one is sure of one's heritage and 
beauty, one does not clamor for recognition; 
one does not even demand a printed history. 



174 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

It is quality, not quantity, that counts, and 
even if nothing more is ever written in or about 
this dear old town, Kingston will have made 
a distinguished contribution to American his- 
tory and literature. 












CHAPTER XI 

PLYMOUTH 

ONE of the favorite pictures of New 
Englanders, and one which hangs in 
innumerable dining-rooms and halls, is by 
Bough ton, the popular American artist, and 
is named "The Return of the Mayflower." I 
suppose thousands of New England children 
have gazed wonderingly at this picture, which, 
contrary to the modern canons of art, "tells a 
story," and many of those naive minds have 
puzzled as to how those poor Pilgrims, who 
had no tea or coffee or milk or starch, managed 
to appear so well fed and so contented, and so 
marvelously neat and clean. The inexhaustible 



176 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

bag which inevitably appeared at crucial 
moments in the career of "Swiss Family Rob- 
inson" is nowhere mentioned in the early 
chronicles of the Plymouth Plantation, and 
the precise manner in which a small vessel of a 
hundred and eighty tons, carrying a hundred 
passengers, and all the innumerable cradles, 
chairs, and highboys which have since flooded 
the museums as "genuine relics" of that first 
voyage, could also have brought sufiicient 
washboards, soap, and flatirons to have kept 
the charming costumes so immaculate is a 
mystery which will probably never be solved 
— especially since the number of relics ap- 
pears to increase instead of diminish with the 
passage of time. 

However, that is a mere trifle. Mr. Bough- 
ton, in catching this touching and dramatic 
moment in the history of the Plymouth Col- 
ony, has rendered a graphic service to us all, 
and if we could stand upon the little plateau 
on which this man and maid are standing, and 
could look out with them — we should see — 
what should we see? 



PLYMOUTH 177 

We may, indeed, stand upon the little pla- 
teau — possibly it is no other than the base of 
Cole's Hill, that pathetic spot on which the 
dead were buried those first sad months, the 
ground above being leveled and planted with 
corn lest the Indians should count the number 
of the lost — and look out upon that selfsame 
harbor, but the sight which meets our eyes 
will be a very different one from that which 
met theirs. Let us, if we can, for the space of 
half an hour or so, imagine that we are stand- 
ing beside this Pilgrim man and maid, on the 
day on which Mr. Boughton portrayed them. 

Instead of 1920 it is 1621. It is the 5th of 
April: the winter of terrifying sicknesses and 
loss has passed; of the hundred souls which 
left England the autumn previously more 
than a half have died. The Mayflower which 
brought them all over, and which has re- 
mained in the harbor all winter, is now, having 
made repairs and taking advantage of the 
more clement weather, trimming her sails for 
the thirty-one days' return voyage to Eng- 
land. They may return with her, if they wish. 



178 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

any or all of the sturdy little band ; they may 
leave the small, smoky log cabins; the scanty 
fare of corn and fish ; the harassing fear of the 
Indians; they may leave the privations, the 
cramped quarters, and return to civilized life 
— to friends and relatives, to blooming Eng- 
lish hedgerows and orderly English churches. 
But no one — no, not a single one returns ! 
They have thrown in their lot with the new 
country — the new life. Their nearest civilized 
neighbors are the French of Nova Scotia, five 
hundred miles to the north, and the English 
of Virginia five hundred miles to the south. 
But they are undaunted. And yet — who can 
doubt that as they gaze out upon the familiar 
sails — the last banner between themselves 
and their ancestral home, and as they see 
them sailing out and out until they sink below 
the verge of sea and sky, the tears *'rise in the 
heart and gather to the eyes" in "thinking of 
the days that are no more." 

Three hundred years ago ! The same harbor 
now as then, with the highland of Cape Cod 
dimly outlined in the gray eastern horizon; 



PLYMOUTH 179 

the bluffs of Manomet nearer on the right; op- 
posite them, on the left, Duxbury Beach comes 
down, and ends in the promontory which holds 
the Gurnet Lights. Clarke's Island — already 
so named — lies as it does to-day, but save 
for these main topographical outlines the Ply- 
mouth at which we are looking in our imagina- 
tion would be quite unrecognizable to us. 

There is a little row of houses — seven of 
them — that is all. Log cabins, two-roomed, 
of the crudest build, thatched with wildgrass, 
the chinks between the logs filled with clay, 
the floors made of split logs; lighted at night 
with pieces of pitch pine. Each lot measures 
three rods long and a rod and a half wide, and 
they run on either side of the single street (the 
first laid out in New England, and ever after- 
ward to be known as Leyden Street), which, 
in its turn, is parallel to the Town Brook. 
There is no glass in these cabin windows : oiled 
paper suffices; the household implements are 
of the fewest. The most primitive modern 
camping expedition is replete with luxuries of 
which this colony knows nothing. They have 



180 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

no cattle of any kind, which means no milk or 
butter; they have no poultry or eggs. Twenty- 
six acres of cultivated ground — twenty-one 
of corn, the other five of wheat, rye, and bar- 
ley — have been quite enough for the twenty- 
one men and six boys (all who were well 
enough to work) to handle, but it is not a great 
deal to feed them all. At one end of the street 
stands the common house, twenty feet square, 
where the church services are held; the store- 
house is near the head of the pier; and at the 
top of what is now Burial Hill is the timber 
fort, twenty by twenty, built the January be- 
fore by Myles Standish. In April, 1621, this is 
all there is to what is now the prosperous town 
of Plymouth. 

And yet — not entirely. There are a few 
things left in the Plymouth of to-day which 
were in the Plymouth of three hundred years 
ago. If our man and maid should turn into Pil- 
grim Hall their eyes would fall upon some of 
the selfsame objects which were familiar sights 
to them in 1621. Those sturdy oaken chairs 
of Governor Carver, Elder Brewster, and Ed- 



PLYMOUTH 181 

ward Winslow; the square, hooded wooden 
cradle brought over by Dr. Samuel Fuller; 
and the well-preserved reed one which rocked 
Peregrine White, and whose quaint stanchness 
suggests the same Dutch influence which char- 
acterizes the spraddling octagonal windmills 
— they would quickly recognize all of these. 
Some of the books, too, chiefly religious, some 
in classic tongues, William Bradford's Geneva 
Bible printed in 1592, and others bearing the 
mark of 1615, would be well known to them, 
although we must not take it for granted that 
the lady — or the man either — can read. 
Well-worn the Bibles are, however, and we 
need not think that lack of learning prevented 
any of the Pilgrims from imbibing both the 
letter and spirit of the Book. Those who could 
write were masters of a fine, flowing script 
that shames our modern scrawl, as is well 
testified by the Patent of the Plymouth Col- 
ony — the oldest state document in New 
England — as well as by the final will and 
various deeds of Peregrine White, and many 
others. The small, stiff baby shoes which en- 



182 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

cased the infant feet of Josiah Winslow, the 
son of Governor Winslow and destined to be 
Governor himself, are of a pattern familiar to 
our man and maid, as are the now tarnished 
swords of Carver, Brewster, and Standish. 
Probably they have puzzled, as we are still 
doing, over the Kufic or Arabic inscriptions 
on the last. The monster kettle and generous 
pewter plate brought over by the doughty 
Captain would be too well known to them 
to attract their attention, as would be the 
various tankards and goblets, and the beau- 
tiful mortar and pestle brought over by Wins- 
low. But the two-tined fork they would regard 
with curiosity, for forks were not used, even 
in England, until 1650. The teapots, too, 
which look antiquated enough to us, would 
fill them with wonder, for tea was practically 
unknown in both colony and mother country 
until 1657. Those fragments of rude agricul- 
tural implements which we treasure would not 
interest our man and maid for whom they are 
ordinary sights, and neither would they re- 
gard with the same historical interest that 



PLYMOUTH 183 

moves us the bits of stone from the Scrooby 
Manor in England, the bricks from the old 
pier at Delft Haven in Holland, or the piece 
of carved pew-back from the old church at 
Scrooby. Possibly our Pilgrim maid is one of 
the few who can write, and if so, her fingers 
have doubtless fashioned a sampler as exqui- 
site as that of Lora Standish, whose meek 
docility and patient workmanship are forever 
preserved in her cross-stitched words. 

From all around the walls of Pilgrim Hall 
look down fine, stern old portraits, real and 
imaginary, of the early colonists. Modern 
critics may bicker over the authenticity of the 
white bull on which Priscilla Alden is taking 
her wedding trip; they may quarrel over the 
fidelity of the models and paintings of the 
Mayflower, and antiquarians may diligently 
unearth bits of bone to substantiate their pet 
theories. Our man and maid could tell us all, 
but, alas, their voices are so far away we can- 
not hear them. They will never speak the 
words which will settle any of the oft-disputed 
points, and, unfortunately, they will leave us 



184 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

forever to argue about the truth of the famous 
Plymouth Rock. 

To present the well-worn story of Plymouth 
Rock from an angle calculated to rouse even a 
semblance of fresh interest is comparable to 
offering a well-fed man a piece of bread, and 
expecting him to be excited over it as a nov- 
elty. Bread is the staff of life, to be sure, but it 
is also accepted as matter of course in the aver- 
age diet, and the story of Plymouth Rock is 
part and parcel of every school-book and 
guide-book in the country. The distinguished, 
if somewhat irreverent, visitor, who, after be- 
ing reduced to partial paralysis by the oft- 
repeated tale, ejaculated fervently that he 
wished the rock had landed on the Pilgrims 
instead of the Pilgrims on the rock, voiced the 
first original remark about this historic relic 
which has refreshed our ears for many years. 
However, as Americans we are thoroughly 
imbued with the theory on which our adver- 
tising is based. Although it would seem that 
every housekeeper in the land had been kept 
fully informed for forty years of the advan- 



PLYMOUTH 185 

tages incident to the use of a certain soap, the 
manufacturers still persist in reciting these 
benefits. And why? Because new housekeepers 
come into existence with each new day. So, if 
there be any man who comes to Plymouth 
who does not know the story of Plymouth 
Rock, it is here set down for him, as accurately 
and briefly as possible. 

This rock — which is an oval, glacial boulder 
of about seven tons — was innocently rearing 
its massive, hoary head from the water one 
day in December, 1620, as it had done for 
several thousand years previously in unmo- 
lested oblivion. While engaged in this ponder- 
ous but harmless occupation it was sighted by 
a boatful of men and women — the first who 
had ever chosen to land on this particular part 
of the coast. The rock presented a moderately 
dry footing, and they sailed up to it, and a 
charming young woman, attired, according to 
our amiable painter, in the cleanest and fresh- 
est of aprons and the most demure of caps, set 
a daintily shod foot upon it and leaped lightly 
to shore. This was Mary Chilton, and she was 



186 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

promptly followed by an equally trig young 
man — John Alden. Thus commenced the 
founding of Plymouth Colony, and thus was 
sown the seed of innumerable pictures, poems, 
stories, and sermons. 

Now the Pilgrims themselves, in none of 
their various accounts, ever mention the in- 
cident of the landing described above, or the 
rock. In fact they are so entirely silent about 
it that historians — besides discrediting the 
pretty part about Mary Chilton and John 
Alden, in the brusque fashion characteristic 
of historians — have pooh-poohed the whole 
story, arguing that the rock was altogether 
too far away from the land to be a logical step- 
ping-place, and referring to the only authentic 
record of that first landing, which merely 
reads: "They sounded y*" harbor & founde it 
fitt for shipping, and marched into y'' land 
& found diverse cornfeilds & little running 
brooks, a place fitt for situation: at least it was 
y"" best they could find." The Pilgrims, then, 
were quite oblivious of the rock, the historians 
are entirely skeptical concerning it, and the 



PLYMOUTH 187 

following generation so indifferent to the tra- 
dition which was gradually formulating, that 
in the course of events it was half -covered with 
a wharf, and used as a doorstep to a ware- 
house. 

This was an ignominious position for a 
magnificent free boulder which had been a 
part of the untrammeled sea and land for 
centuries, but this lowly occupation was in- 
finitely less trying than the fate which was 
awaiting. At the time the wharf was suggested, 
the idea that the rock was the actual landing- 
place of the first colonists had gained such 
momentum that a party was formed in its 
defense. An aged man, Thomas Faunce, was 
produced. He was ninety-five and confined to 
an armchair. He had not been born until 
twenty-six years after the landing of the Pil- 
grims; his father, whom he quoted as declar- 
ing this to be the original rock and identical 
landing-place, had not even come over in the 
Mayflower, but in the Anne. However, this 
venerable Canute, carried to the water's edge 
in his armchair, in the presence of many wit- 



188 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

nesses, assured them and all posterity that 
this was the genuine, undeniable landing-place 
of the Pilgrims. And from that moment the 
belief was so firmly set in the American mind 
that no power could possibly dislodge it. In 
accordance with this suddenly acquired re- 
spect, it was decided to move the huge bulk 
to the more conspicuous location of the Town 
Square. Wlien it was lifted from its prehis- 
toric bed, it broke, and this was hailed as a 
propitious omen of the coming separation of 
the Colonies from the mother country. Only 
the upper half was dragged up to the Town 
Square — a process which took twenty yoke 
of oxen and was accompanied by wild huzzah- 
ing. There the poor, broken thing lay in the 
sun, at the bottom of the Liberty Pole on 
which was flying, "Liberty or Death." But 
its career as a public feature had only begun. 
It remained in the square until 1834, and 
then on July 4 it was decided to drag it to a 
still more conspicuous place. So with a formal 
procession, it was again hoisted and hauled 
and set down in front of the entrance porch of 



PLYMOUTH 189 

Pilgrim Hall, where it lay like a captive mam- 
moth animal for curious folk to gaze at. Here 
it was granted almost half a century of un- 
disturbed if not secluded slumber. But the 
end was not yet. In 1880 it was once more laid 
hold of and carted back to its original setting, 
and welded without ceremony, to the part 
from which it had been sundered. Now all of 
this seems quite enough — more than enough 
— of pitiless publicity, for one old rock whose 
only offense had been to be lifting its head 
above the water on a December day in 1620. 
But no — just as the mind of man takes a 
singular satisfaction in gazing at mummies 
preserved in human semblance in the un- 
earthly stillness of the catacombs, so the once 
massive boulder — now carefully mended — 
was placed upon the neatest of concrete bases, 
and over it was reared, from the designs of 
Hammatt Billings, the ugliest granite canopy 
imaginable — in which canopy, to complete 
the grisly atmosphere of the catacombs, were 
placed certain human bones found in an ex- 
ploration of Cole's Hill. Bleak and homeless 



190 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

the old rock now lies passively in forlorn state 
under its atrocious shelter, behind a strong 
iron grating, and any of a dozen glib street 
urchins, in syllables flavored with Cork, or 
Genoese, or Polish accents, will, for a penny, 
relate the facts substantially as I have stated 
them.^ 

It is easy to be unsympathetic in regard to 
any form of fetishism which we do not share. 
And while the bare fact remains that we are 
not at all sure that the Pilgrims landed on 
this rock, and we are entirely sure that its 
present location and setting possess no ro- 
mantic allurement, yet bare facts are not the 
whole truth, and even when correct they are 
often the superficial and not the fundamental 

^ It is hoped that by the summer of 1921 a beautiful 
and dignified portico of granite will be raised as a final 
and permanent memorial over the rock, which will be moved 
for the last time — lowered to as near its original bed as 
possible. This work, which has been taken in charge by the 
National Society of Colonial Dames of America will be exe- 
cuted by McKim, Mead & White. The General Society of 
Mayflower Descendants are also working for the redemption 
of the first Pilgrim burial place on Cole's Hill. The Pilgrim 
Society is to assume the perpetual car^ of bpth memorial 
and lot. 



PLYMOUTH 191 

part of the truth. Those hundreds — those 
thousands — of earnest-eyed men and women 
who have stood beside this rock with tears in 
their eyes, and emotions too deep for words 
in their hearts, "beheving where they cannot 
prove," have not only interpreted the vital 
significance of the place, but, by their very 
emotion, have sanctified it. 

It really makes little difference whether the 
testimony of Thomas Faunce was strictly ac- 
curate or not; it really makes little difference 
that the Hammatt Billings canopy is indeed 
dreadful. Plymouth Rock has come to sym- 
bolize the corner-stone of the United States as 
a nation, and symbols are the most beautiful 
and the most enduring expression of any na- 
tional or human experience. 

It is estimated that over one hundred 
thousand visitors come to Plymouth annually. 
They all go to see the Rock; most of them 
clamber up to the quaint Burial Hill and read 
a few of the oldest inscriptions ; they glance at 
the National Monument to the forefathers, 
bearing the largest granite figure in the world, 



192 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

and they take a turn through Pilgrim Hall. 
But there is one place they often forget to see, 
and that is the harbor itself. 

We began our tour through Plymouth 
through the eyes of a Pilgrim man and maid 
watching the departing Mayflower. It was 
the Mayflower, battered and beaten, her sails 
blackened and mended, her leaks hastily 
caulked, which was the first vessel to sail into 
Plymouth Harbor — a harbor so joyfully de- 
scribed as being a "most hopeful place" with 
*' innumerable store of fowl and excellent good 
... in fashion like a sickel or fish hook." 

All that first dreadful winter, while the Pil- 
grims were struggling to make roofs to cover 
their heads, while, with weeping hearts, they 
buried their dead, and when, according to the 
good and indestructible instincts of life, which 
persist in spite of every calamity, they planted 
seed for the coming spring — all this while the 
Mayflower lay at anchor in the harbor. Every 
morning they could see her there; any hour of 
the day they could glance out at her; while 
they slept they were conscious of her presence. 



fM^ 




























■\-i 



PLYMOUTH 193 

And just so long as she was there, just so long 
could they see a tangible connection between 
themselves and the life, which, although al- 
ready strangely far away, was, nevertheless, 
the nearest and the dearest existence they had 
known. And then in April, the familiar vessel, 
whose outlines were as much a part of the sea- 
scape as the Gurnet or the bluffs of Manomet, 
vanished: vanished as completely as if she 
had never been. The water which parted under 
her departing keel flowed together. There was 
no sign on earth or sea or in the sky of that 
last link between the little group of colonists 
and their home land. They were as much alone 
as Enoch Arden on his desert isle. Can we 
imagine the emptiness, the illimitable loneli- 
ness of that bay.f^ One small shallop down by 
the pier — that was the only visible connec- 
tion between themselves and England! 

I do not believe that we can really appre- 
ciate their sense of complete severance — 
their sense of utter isolation. And I do not 
believe that we can appreciate the wild thrill 
of excitement, the sudden gush of freshly 



194 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

established connection that ran through the 
colony, when, seven months later — the fol- 
lowing November — a ship sailed into the 
harbor. It was the Fortune bringing with her 
news and letters from home — word from that 
other world — and bringing also thirty-five 
new colonists, among them William Brewster's 
eldest son and Robert Cushman. Probably the 
greetings were so joyful, the messages so 
eagerly sought, the flutter of welcome so great 
that it was not until several days had passed 
that they realized that the chief word which 
Thomas Weston (the London merchant who 
was the head of the company which had 
financed the expedition) had sent them was 
one of reproof. The Mayflower had brought 
no profitable cargo back to England, he com- 
plained, an omission which was "wonderful 
and worthily distasted." While he admitted 
that they had labored under adverse circum- 
stances, he unkindly added that a quarter of 
the time they had spent in discoursing and 
arguing and consulting could have profitably 
been spent in other ways. That the first official 



PLYMOUTH 195 

word from home should be one of such cruel 
reprimand struck the colonists — who had so 
wistfully waited for a cheering message — ■ 
very hard. Half frozen, half starved, sick, de- 
pressed, they had been forced to struggle so 
desperately to maintain even a foothold on 
the ladder of existence, that it had not been 
humanly possible for them to fulfill their 
pledge to the Company. Bradford's letter 
back to Weston — dignified, touching — is 
sufficient vindication. When the Fortune re- 
turned she "was laden with good clapboards, 
as full as she could stowe, and two hogsheads 
of beaver and other skins," besides sassafras — 
a cargo valued at about five hundred pounds. 
In spite of the fact that this cargo was promptly 
stolen by a French cruiser off the English 
coast, it nevertheless marks the foundation of 
the fur and lumber trade in New England. Al- 
though this first visitor brought with her a 
patent of their lands (a document still pre- 
served in Pilgrim Hall, with the signatures 
and seals of the Duke of Lenox, the Marquis 
of Hamilton, the Earl of Warwick, and Sir 



196 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

Ferdinando Gorges), yet to us, reading history 
in the perspective of three hundred years, the 
disagi'eeable impression of Weston's letter out- 
weighs the satisfaction for the patent. When 
the Fortune sailed away it was like the de- 
parture of a rich, fault-finding aunt, who sud- 
denly descends upon a household of poor re- 
lations, bringing presents, to be sure, but with 
such cutting disapproval on her lips that it 
mars the entire pleasure of her visit. 

The harbor was once more empty. I suppose 
that in time the Pilgrims half forgot, half for- 
gave, the sting of Weston's reproof. Again 
they gazed out and waited for a sail; again 
England seemed very far away. So, doubtless, 
in the spring, when a shallop appeared from a 
fishing vessel, they all eagerly hurried down to 
greet it. But if the Fortune had been like a 
rich and disagreeable aunt, this new visitation 
was like an influx of small, unruly cousins. 
And such hungry cousins! Weston had sent 
seven men to stay with them until arrange- 
ments could be made for another settlement. 
New Englanders are often criticized for their 



PLYMOUTH 197 

lack of hospitality, and in this first historic 
case of unexpected guests the larder was prac- 
tically bare. Crops were sown, to be sure, but 
not yet green; the provisions in the store- 
house were gone; it was not the season for 
wild fowl; although there were bass in the 
outer harbor and cod in the bay there was 
neither tackle nor nets to take them. How- 
ever, the seven men were admitted, and given 
shellfish like the rest — and very little beside. 

At this point the Pilgrims looked with less 
favorable eyes upon newcomers into the har- 
bor, and when shortly after two ships appeared 
bringing sixty more men from Weston, con- 
sternation reigned. These emigrants were sup- 
posed to get their own food from their own ves- 
sels and merely lodge on shore, but they proved 
a lawless set and stole so much green corn that 
it seriously reduced the next year's supply. 
After six weeks, however, these uninvited 
guests took themselves off to Wessagusset (now 
Weymouth) leaving their sick behind, and 
only the briefest of "thank you's." 

The next caller was the Plantation. She 



198 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

anchored only long enough to offer some sorely 
needed provisions at such extortionate prices 
that the colonists could not buy them. An- 
other slap in the face ! 

Obviously, none of these visitors had proved 
very satisfactory. It had been entertaining 
under difficulties, and if the entertainers had 
hoped for the "angels unawares," they had 
been decidedly disappointed. Therefore it is 
easy to believe that they took fresh courage 
and sincere delight when, in July, 1623, the 
Anne and the Little James arrived — no stran- 
gers, for they brought with them additional 
stores, and best of all, good friends and close 
kinsfolk from the church at Leyden. Yes, the 
Pilgrims were delighted, but, alas, tradition has 
it that when they pressed forward in glad 
gi-eeting to their old acquaintances, these latter 
started back, nonplussed — aghast ! Like Mr. 
Boughton they had fondly pictured an ideal 
rustic community, in which the happy, care- 
free colonists reveled in all the beauty of pic- 
turesque and snowy collars and cuffs in Arden- 
like freedom. Instead they saw a row of rough 



PLYMOUTH 199 

log cabins and a group of work-worn, shabby 
men and women, men and women whose faces 
were Hned with exposure, and whose backs 
were bent with toil, and who, for their most 
hospitable feast, had only a bit of shellfish 
and water to offer. Many of the newcomers 
promptly burst into tears, and begged to re- 
turn to England immediately. Poor Pilgrims! 
Rebuffed — and so unflatteringly — with each 
arriving maritime guest, who can doubt that 
there was born in them at that moment the 
constitutional dislike for unexpected company 
which has characterized New England ever 
since ? 

However, in a comparatively short time the 
colonists who had been brought over in the 
Anne and the Little James — those who 
stayed, for some did return at once — ad- 
justed themselves to the new life. Many mar- 
ried — both Myles Standish and Governor 
Bradford found wives among them; and now 
the Plymouth Colony may be said to have 
fairly started. 

Just as a trail which is first a mere thread 



200 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

leading to some out-of-the-way cabin becomes 
a path and then a road, and in due time a wide 
thorouglifare, so the way across the Atlantic 
from Old England to New became more charted 

— more traveled. At first there was only one 
boat and one net for fishing. In five years 
there was a fleet of fifty fishing vessels. Ten 
years later we have note of ten foreign vessels 
in the harbor in a single week. And to-day, if 
the Pilgrim man and maid whom we joined at 
the beginning of our reminiscences could gaze 
out over the harbor, they would see it as full of 
masts as a cornfield is of stalks. Every kind of 
boat finds its way in and out; and not only 
pleasure craft: Plymouth Harbor is second 
only to Boston among the Massachusetts 
ports of entry, receiving annual foreign im- 
ports valued at over $7,000,000. Into the har- 
bor, where once a single shallop w^as the only 
visible sign of man's dominion over the water, 
now sail great vessels from Yucatan and the 
Philippines, bringing sisal and manila for the 
largest cordage company in the whole country 

— a company with an employees' list of two 



PLYMOUTH 201 

thousand names, and an annual output of 
$10,000,000. Furthermore, the flats in the har- 
bor are planted with clams, which (through 
the utilization of shells for poultry feeding, 
and by means of canning for bouillon) yield a 
profit of from five hundred to eight hundred 
dollars an acre. 

No, our Pilgrim man and maid would not 
recognize, in this Plymouth of factories and 
industries, the place where once stood the row 
of log cabins, with oiled-paper windows. And 
yet, after all, it is not the prosperous town 
of to-day, but the rude settlement of yester- 
day, which chiefly lives in the hearts of the 
American people. And it lives, not because of 
its economic importance, but because of its 
unique sentimental value. As John Fiske so 
admirably states: "Historically their enter- 
prise [that of the Pilgrims at Plymouth] is in- 
teresting not so much for what it achieved as 
for what it suggested. Of itseK the Plymouth 
Colony could hardly have become a wealthy 
and powerful state. Its growth was extremely 
glow. After ten years its numbers were but 



202 THE OLD COAST ROAD 

three hundred. In 1643, when the exodus 
had come to an end and the New England 
Confederacy was formed, the population of 
Plymouth was but three thousand. In an es- 
tablished community, indeed, such a rate of 
increase would be rapid, but was not sufficient 
to raise in New England a power which could 
overcome Indians and Dutchmen and French- 
men and assert its will in opposition to the 
Crown. It is when we view the founding of 
Plymouth in relation to what came after- 
ward, that it assumes the importance which 
belongs to the beginning of a new era." 

For this reason the permanent position of 
Plymouth in our history is forever assured. 
Old age, which may diminish the joys of 
youth, preserves inviolate memories which 
nothing can destroy. The place whose quiet 
fame is made is surer of the future than the one 
which is on the brink of fabulous glory. It is 
impossible to overestimate the significance of 
this spot. 

The Old Coast Road — the oldest in New 
England — began here and pushed its tortuous 



PLYMOUTH 203 

way up to Boston along the route we have so 
Hghtly followed. Inheritors of a nation which 
these pioneers strove manfully, worshipfully, 
to found, need we be ashamed of deep emotion 
as we stand here, on this shore, where they 
landed three hundred years ago? 




THE END 



CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
U . S . A 



